At Current Pace, Tablets Will Outsell PCs By Q2 2014

The PC market is in poor health, and consumers love tablets. When do those two trends cross? No prediction is perfect, but given simple trend analysis, it appears that by the second quarter of 2014, tablets will likely outsell the PC market.
That said, current market dynamics could accelerate, pushing us over that mark a bit sooner. Let’s get into the figures to untangle just where we stand.
The Next Web’s Emil Protalinksi broke down the most recent tablet sales figures, using data served by Strategy Analytics. The rough picture is that in the second quarter of 2012, according to the firm’s analysis, 51.7 million tablets were shipped globally. That figure is up from 36.1 million in the second quarter of 2012.
How does that compare to the vanilla PC market? As was reported at the time, second-quarter PC shipments totaled around 76 million units. Other estimates had the figure at 75.5 million, but that’s close enough for this sort of comparison.
The simple story is that the PC market is slipping, down 11 percent year over year in the most recent quarter, while tablets are up sharply. In the past year, from the second quarter of 2012 to the second quarter of 2013, tablet shipments were up around 43 percent. Much of that growth was in the Android segment, it’s worth noting. Microsoft managed to put marks on the board as well, but as Apple’s tablet products find market saturation, Android appears to be the key growth platform for the touch-computing niche.
IDC raised its recent PC market decline prediction from 1.3 percent for 2013 to 7.8 percent. That still feels optimistic. Here are some simple numbers: Assuming that the PC market declines another 11 percent in the coming year, and the tablet market manages, let’s say, 30 percent growth in the next 12 months, we end up with 67.6 million shipped PCs and 67.2 million shipped tablets. Those numbers presume that tablet growth slows in the next four quarters compared to earlier rates.
In a separate estimate, IDC concludes that tablet shipments will grow as much as 59 percent in calendar 2013. At that pace, and assuming that the PC market doesn’t dramatically improve, the lines simply meet sooner. At current tally, IDC itself predicts tablets will overtake PCs in 2015, but their PC estimates in that case feel far too optimistic, though Microsoft would prefer them.
PC shipments were down 14 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2013, and 11 percent down the next. That trend is north of painful.
So even assuming that tablet growth is slower than IDC expects, and that PC shipments simply continue their current pace of decline, by the second quarter of 2014, tablets and PCs will ship similar unit volumes. We’re not post-PC yet, but we are certainly almost at PC-tablet parity, and that’s a real market change.
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Install Android OS on PC

Today we will be talking about installing Android operating system on your computer. Before we begin this tutorial, we should mention the software you need to have in order to successfully install Android on your computer. The first software is VirtualBox by Oracle and the other is the .ISO file of Android Live CD. You can download VirtualBox for free from www.virtualbox.org. Simply choose your computer’s configuration and select the version of the program for download. The second file needed for this tutorial is available at http://code.google.com/p/live-android/ where you can click on the download link and select the type of download which suits you the best.

 How to install Android OS on PC

Once you have both files downloaded on your computer, we can start. Open the VirtualBox and choose the name for your virtual machine and the type of the guest operating system you plan to install onto the virtual machine. Choose whichever name of the virtual machine you see fit, but make sure you select Linux under OS Type (under Version choose “Other Linux”) because the Android OS has Linux kernel in it. Next, confirm the recommended base memory size of 256 MB.

Now you are going to need to have a new hard disk to be used as the boot hard disk – you can either create a new one or use an existing. We recommend creating a new one. It is done by clicking on “Create new hard disk”>Next>”Hard disk storage type” where you should choose “fixed-size storage”. You can safely enter the size of 2 GB which should be more than enough and click on next in order to create the new hard disk. After the hard disk has been created, press next to see the summary of the virtual machine you are about to create. If everything displayed is correct, press the finish button.

Now you will have to mount the .iso file on the newly created virtual machine. You can do this in the VirtualBox when you click on Settings>Storage and under “Storage tree” choose the icon called “Empty”. Then, under “Attributes” click the icon right next to the slot CD/DVD Device which will ask you to choose a CD/DVD image. Click “Add” and find the location where you saved your liveandroid .iso file and double-click it. Now it will appear in your CD/DVD Images in the Virtual Media Manager where you will be able to select. When you are back in the Settings of your virtual machine, go to “System” and, under “Motherboard”, uncheck “Enable absolute pointing device”. When you disable this category, only a standard PS/2 mouse will be emulated. Once you have done it, press “OK” to return to the program’s main window.

Now you can click on Start to get the VirtualBox up and running. When you see a message saying that the Virtual machine does not support mouse pointer integration in the current video mode, just click OK and continue until you see the home screen of the Android Live. When another message pops up, click on Capture in order for the Virtual Machine to capture the host mouse pointer and the keyboard which will make them unavailable to other applications running on your host machine.