According to DisplaySearch, Apple shipped 10.2 million mobile PCs in the fourth quarter of 2010–iPads, MacBooks and MacBook Pros–to claim a 17.2 percent share of the mobile PC market. That makes it the new global leader, a title it wrests from Hewlett-Packard, which shipped 9.3 million units during the same period for a 15.6 share and a second-place ranking. Acer ranked third, with 14 percent of the market and 8.4 million units shipped. Dell ranked fourth, with 5.9 million units shipped and a 9.9 percent market share.

An interesting rebalancing of market power and one that DisplaySearch believes is the result not just of first-mover advantage from the iPad, but notebook shipment growth that exceeds the industry average. Said Richard Shim, senior analyst at DisplaySearch, “Apple is currently benefiting from significant and comprehensive growth from both sectors of the mobile PC spectrum, notebooks and tablet PCs.”

[Image credit: Gizmodo commenter Ahubbuch]

Indeed. What was it Bill Gates said about the iPad? “It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’”

Mmhmm.

One interesting revelation is that both Hewlett-Packard and Acer, the top two vendors by volume in the Gartner survey, saw their shipments decline year-on-year in a period where the rest of the industry was seeing growth, albeit slower than had been previously expected.

Hewlett-Packard maintained its market lead, with a share of about 18 percent worldwide, and 29 percent in the U.S. Acer came in second. Both saw their unit volumes decline. For HP, that translated to a decline of more than 200,000 units in fourth-quarter PC sales, or a little more than 1 percent. For Acer, which had hitched its wagon to the netbook craze a few years ago, it translated to a decline of nearly 2 percent, or more than 222,000 units. Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba all saw their shipments grow, with Lenovo leading the pack, growing a healthy 21 percent.

Gartner says that worldwide shipments totaled 93.5 million units in the fourth quarter, which amounted to growth of only 3 percent over the same period a year earlier, falling short of the 5 percent growth it had previously forecast. Gartner Analyst Mikako Kitagawa blames the iPad and other media tablets for the slackening growth. She says the industry’s one bright spot, oddly enough, is in enterprise, where companies are upgrading the machines they issue their employees. For the full year, the worldwide PC industry recovered from the recession, growing nearly 14 percent to 308 million units.

Apple remained in fifth place in the U.S. with a share of market just shy of 10 percent, and less than a percentage point behind Toshiba. Notably, this figure doesn’t include iPads, which hit a combined 7.5 million units in Apple’s third and fourth fiscal quarters, both of which ended before the holiday season. (Apple will reports earnings for its first fiscal quarter, which includes the holiday season, next week.)

IDC’s survey found the same trend, but it differed from the Gartner survey on a few key points. IDC put Dell in second place, behind HP and ahead of Acer in the worldwide market share race. I’ll attribute this to differences in methodology, since Gartner and IDC differ a little in how they count.

Another interesting note is that IDC paints a more negative picture of Acer, pegging its decline in fourth-quarter sales at 15 percent from 2009 to 2010. I asked IDC analyst Loren Loverde about the difference in IDC’s results versus Gartner’s, and he said part of it comes from differences in methodology, but also from the fact that Acer is closely held and so is a tricky company to track, and the data it does disclose isn’t as detailed as the other companies’.

But Loverde also says decline, whether 2 percent or 15 percent, reflects a stark business reality for Acer. The road to PC growth through mini-notebooks and geographic expansion is closed. It was a good strategy while it lasted.

The movie was chosen for the group’s best picture award, while David Fincher got best director, Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg was named best actor and Aaron Sorkin received the best screenplay award.

The win is a strong indication that the movie is going to be the one to beat at the Oscars, which take place February 27. Nominations for the top prize for movies will be announced January 25.

“The Social Network” has already won awards from critics in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Indiana and the National Board of Review.

It has also been nominated for multiple Golden Globe Awards, and was named to the American Film Institute’s top 10 of 2010.

(See the movie’s Web site for a thorough list of awards and nominations.)

Me, I’m a peppy, perky guy. Ask anybody! Still, if I were a gloomy Gus, I’d spend some time reminiscing about 2010′s Consumer Electronics Show, where I spent a bunch of time checking out:

• Hearst’s Skiff e-reader
• The Plastic Logic Que e-reader
• Palm’s new line of smartphones
• Keychest, a dizzingly dull rights-management scheme from Disney.

A year later, and they’re all gone: Either officially dead, or just pining for fjords, and very unlikely to perk up.

Not all of this stuff was vaporware, in the technical sense. Palm, at least, really did sell a few of those Palm Pre Pluses before it gave up and sold out to HP.

Still, an 0-for-4 experience like that is enough to make a humble media correspondent want to avoid checking out new technology altogether, and that’s basically what I’m going to do.

I might take a look at the UltraViolet media locker demo, but that’s about it. I’m headed to Las Vegas this morning* with the primary goal of talking to media people, many of whom live in New York, just like I do.

So yes, it might seem a little odd to head across the country to talk to people who live and work a few miles away, but there’s a logic to it. Trust me!**

And if you do want smart, incisive technology coverage, trust the rest of the All Things D team: Walt, Katie, Kara and Ina are on the ground already, and the rest of the gang is monitoring developments from their home bases. It’s good stuff!

*Not just because I enjoy being fashionably late, but because it was many hundreds of dollars cheaper to fly out today than earlier in the week. (And also because I’m old, and at my age every extra day you spend in Las Vegas is a dog year.)

**Totally not a boondoggle. Note the line about saving money on airfare, above.

Although he later clarified, “I wasn’t making a value judgment,” maintaining multiple identities, whether it’s as simple as publishing some photos to Picasa and others to Facebook, is becoming a big trend in online life.

Even as Zuckerberg’s Facebook extended its dominance in 2010 to the point where it seems to have a social Web monopoly, it was still a landmark year for social network competition.

Where in the past, tech industry watchers derided new start-ups for launching “yet another social network,” ever more users seem to be constructing multiple online presences that utilize the strengths of various platforms and networks.

And this splintered approach is only going to increase.

Internet users now have plenty of outlets for self-expression. They can prioritize individuality and choose to post on the highly customizable Tumblr, or instead value the comprehensiveness of a network and post on the blander Facebook.

A big part of this shift toward understanding the private online self versus the public online self has been the rise of Twitter. On Twitter, regular users make the sort of decisions celebrities do: What to share about their private lives with their public audience of followers.

Another shift has been the rise of smartphones, along with their quality broadband connections, good cameras and mobile apps.

As an early adopter of various social apps, I’ve recently been confronted with the choice of whether to post a picture taken with my Apple iPhone on-the-go to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Path or Picplz.

Each of them has different audiences, different associations with my personal or professional identities, and different expectations for how people will view and interact with my snapshot. (And I suppose there’s also the option of keeping the pictures to myself on my phone storage.)

Although the people noisiest about privacy on Facebook have at times been the media, publicity of the company’s highly confusing privacy settings seems to have led to many more people being aware of them and perhaps even changing them.

Perhaps that’s why I see an increasing–but still quite small–portion of my Facebook friends using pseudonyms on the service. And when I asked them why, I heard a variety of reasons.

One is a teacher, another prefers to go by the moniker he uses artistically. Yet another is a college student who is applying for jobs and who wants to be more anonymous for a while. Like many of today’s young people, she has become highly conscious of balancing the freedom to be herself online with the way she is perceived by professional contacts.

(A representative for Facebook declined to comment on whether the company has recently been more permissive about allowing pseudonyms, something it has traditionally frowned on.)

Of course, very little of what’s posted online can be trusted to never get out or never be linked to its originator. If you really want to keep your thoughts private and impermanent, of course, keep them in your head.

But there are now many more options for more private communication, many of them having first come out in 2010. They include small-group coordination tools like GroupMe, Fast Society and Beluga. There’s also Path, a start-up from a former Facebooker that is perhaps too limited by design, but is exploring the world of more intimate and personal communications.

For many people, their Facebook network is far from a direct match with their real-world friends, so it will be increasingly important to use these tools to dice circles up and make them more accessible. (Facebook is also trying to address that need with its own Groups tool.)

To be sure, that Facebook map of connections is a highly valuable asset, one the company has fiercely protected, as Google reformulates its approach to the social Web.

Splitting your users into an entirely new social graph will certainly hamper growth. For instance, another early Facebooker launched Jumo, a social network for people connecting with nonprofits that seems to risk being redundant with, and isolated from, similar efforts on other platforms.

And Foursquare, despite its zeitgeisty innovation for sharing real-time location updates, has accumulated only about five million users in the last two years.

However, the speedy growth of new social networks like the addictive Instagram–which is like Twitter for pictures and got one million users in its first two months–shows that there’s still an opportunity to take an independent path.

What seems particularly notable about the current moment is that many people are evolving their approach to expressing themselves online, and they now have many tools and contexts to do so. And it’s up to them if these multiple identities will be unified anywhere except in their heads.

(Image collage at top of post courtesy Flickr user shannonkringen.)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Confused by all those options? There’s also a basic RunKeeper app that has enough tracking and reporting features for many users and has always been free. I wrote recently about its social features.

Apple recently said RunKeeper Pro was one of its top-grossing apps of 2010. FitnessKeeper, a small Boston-based start-up that just raised $1.1 million in funding, wouldn’t disclose revenue or download numbers, but said it has been cash-flow positive every month since it was founded two-and-a-half years ago.

The company announced this week it would take down one part of its pay barrier from now through the end of January, giving away RunKeeper Pro for free during New Year’s resolution season.

Launched yesterday on iPhone, that promotion has already been highly successful, with 171,000 RunKeeper Pro downloads yesterday on the iPhone, more than 10 times as many as it gets in a normal day. The app is currently quickly climbing the Apple App Store charts, now at No. 5 in the free app category (it was No. 12 this morning). The promotion is also launching on Android this afternoon.

And as of this writing, it’s only New Year’s resolution time in about half the world.

Which would spike iPad sales from 14 million this year to 36 million in 2011.

“We model Apple’s iPad continuing to dominate…in 2011,” Cihra writes in his 2011 forecast. “iPad not only launched with phenomenal early uptake but effectively sent all wannabes back to the drawing board, delaying most competitive tablet launches well into CY11. Yet we now already look forward to the first iPad 2 refresh in March (i.e., establishing annual cadence for iPads in March, iPhone each June and iPods in Sept). An enormous multi-year opportunity, we continue to view iPads less about the ‘product’ but rather igniting an explosion toward ‘thin-client’ Access computing.”

Given that explosion and Cihra’s forecast of a 226 percent spike in tablet sales, how will the the PC fare in 2011? A bit worse than it did the year prior. Cihra figures global PC market unit growth will slow to about 9 percent in 2011 from 14 percent in 2010.

Guess what happened to that missing five percent?

Says Cihra, “We see cannibalization from ‘thin-client’ iPads/tablets, particularly vs. netbooks and in multi-PC homes, already growing to 1/7th the size of the overall PC market in 2011 and shaving 5 percentage points off what PC growth might otherwise have been.”

Unless, of course, you consider the tablet part of the PC market. If you do, then the global PC market in 2011 and beyond looks quite a bit better, as the chart below shows.

According to 2009′s safely-looking-ahead-at-the-year-to-come articles, 2010 was to be “a year of social media convergence.” It was to be a year in which The Cloud “became part of the everyday lexicon of business” and “a year of invention and innovation.” 2010 was to be not just “the year of the tablet,” but also “the year of the smartphone,” “the year of the tweet” and “the year of location.” Above all, 2010 was to be “a year of significant developments” and generally “a busy year for technology.”

And I suppose it was that. But for me, 2010 was a year like any of year–one not to be taken too seriously. Because if you can’t laugh at Eric Schmidt telling critics of Google Street View to “just move,” Apple telling people that their grip–not the iPhone 4′s antenna–is faulty, or Oracle’s samurai CEO Larry Ellison in a kimono, then, really, what’s the point?

It may be true, as my colleague Peter Kafka noted earlier this week, that there’s little point in pretending we know what’s going to happen in the year ahead, but the year about to pass remains good for a laugh.

Driven by the steady proliferation of multitouch smartphones and tablets–one in particular–the worldwide touchscreen industry will probably see 30 percent year-over-year growth in 2010 by the time the year is over. So says NPD DisplaySearch, which figures suppliers shipped 6.3 million tablet/mini-note touchscreens in the first half of 2010 and more than 20 million in the second half. Quite the upward trend and one that we’ll almost certainly see continue next year as the iPad juggernaut rolls on, more Android tablets arrive at market and consumer and enterprise demand for all of them grows. Wintek and TPK Touch Solutions have a lot to look forward to next year.