Conducted during February, the J.D. Power and Associates’ survey asked 1,857 tablet owners to rate their devices on performance, ease of operation, design, features and cost. Respondents rated the iPad highest, giving it a score of 836 points out of a possible 1,000. That was enough for the device to nab the research house’s top tablet rank for the second consecutive time, though not by much of a lead. With a score of 829 out of 1,000, Amazon’s Kindle Fire came close to tying it. Samsung came reasonably close, as well, with a score of 822, though that came in lower than the industry average of 828.

So, another customer-satisfaction win for Apple, and one we’ll almost certainly see shown off at the company’s next tablet event. Apple’s last tablet award from J.D. Power and Associates is currently front and center on the company’s new “Why iPad” page. That said, it’s worth noting that while the iPad scored better than its rivals, it didn’t score that much better. Apple, Amazon and Samsung are all close enough to the study average that they’re more or less tied.

Worldwide PC shipments came in at 76.3 million units in the first quarter of the year, amounting to a decline of nearly 14 percent. That’s much worse than the firm’s forecast, which called for a decline of 7.7 percent.

The findings also amount to the fourth consecutive quarter in which sales declined compared to the previous quarter. Neither new versions of Windows from Microsoft nor faster chips from Intel spurred new interest among consumers or businesses. Meanwhile, mini-notebook sales hurt the low end of the market.

Acer experienced the largest sales drop in the period, showing a contraction of shipments by nearly 32 percent year on year. Hewlett-Packard, the world’s market leader, saw its shipments fall by nearly 24 percent. Asus, ranked No. 5, saw shipments fall by more than 19 percent. Dell’s shipments fell by nearly 11 percent. The only vendor that didn’t see a contraction in shipments was China’s Lenovo, where shipments were flat year on year.

Even Apple, which ranks among “other” in IDC’s global rankings, saw declines in its leading market, North America, where sales of Macs dropped by 7.5 percent. At this time, however, it has be said that much of the blame for the damage being done to the PC businesses of all the companies around the world can be laid at Apple’s feet: Sales of the iPad, the world’s leading tablet brand, have a lot to do with the collapse in PC sales. While Apple hasn’t yet released sales results for the first calendar quarter of 2013 — its first fiscal quarter is the fourth quarter on the calendar — when it last reported iPad sales, they had swelled by more than 48 percent to nearly 23 million units from 15 million and change the prior year.

Research firm Gartner also chimed in with its findings: They’re bad, too. It was the first quarter in which shipments fell below 80 million units since 2009. By Gartner’s reckoning, Europe led the declines geographically.

Here’s Gartner’s look at the top five:

HP fell nearly 2 percent to $21.91 in after-hours trading. Dell shares ticked up by a penny after hours. Apple shares fell 40 cents. Intel shares fell 36 cents, or more than 1.6 percent. Microsoft fell by more than 1 percent.

As you might expect, there’s good news for any company in the business of building tablets and mobile phones, and lousy news for those building PCs. Worldwide sales of “devices,” a category that combines PCs, tablets, mobile phones and ultramobiles (tiny notebooks, presumably), will approach a combined three billion units by 2017, representing growth of 34 percent from 2012.

Growth will be led by tablets, which are expected to grow by 70 percent, to 467 million units. Phones will break the two-billion-unit mark in 2017, Gartner says. Traditional PCs, on the other hand, will decline by fewer than 300 million units by that year. Obviously, this is bad news for the PC players, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell, who are both struggling to get their PC divisions back on track, while at the same time trying to kick-start mobile device plays. (Click the chart below to make it bigger.)

Another nugget in the Gartner report: Google’s Android devices will dominate, accounting for nearly a billion and a half unit sales by 2017. Its nearest competition will be Microsoft’s Windows, and Apple’s combined portfolio of Mac and iOS devices, which will split about a billion devices between them.

Slower-than-expected shipments in China brought on in part by the timing of the Chinese New Year holiday, plus government budget reductions, cut into sales in January and February, the firm said. The market is now expected to decline by 7.7 percent, which is 2 percentage points worse than previously expected. And it could get still worse. The firm won’t rule out a further drop into a double-digit percentage decline before a possible recovery mid-year.

The latest assessment comes only a few days after IDC released figures showing unabated growth in the market for tablets, which have been cutting into PC sales for years now.

Also, IDC’s dour outlook on PCs doesn’t mention the sales of Apple’s Macs. As it happens, another research firm, NPD, today put out its latest look at Mac sales, and they’re up by 14 percent year on year for January and February. One reason, said analyst Gene Munster of PiperJaffray in a research note to clients today, is that Apple has firmed up its supply of iMacs. Tight supplies knocked shipments down by about 700,000 units in December, Munster said. Even so, Munster expects Mac sales overall to trend down by about 5 percent in the first quarter.

After a decline in shipments by 3.7 percent in 2012, the PC market is expected to contract further in 2013, by at least 1.3 percent, the firm projects.

While it’s not as though anyone expected Microsoft’s Windows 8 to inject any real excitement into the consumer market, there were those who thought it might at least help to arrest the overall decline, especially among consumers. It wasn’t to be. Holiday season PC sales were disappointing, and the economic malaise, especially in Europe, weighed on corporate IT budgets. Shipments in the fourth quarter were down by 8.3 percent, which amounts to the worst holiday quarter on record, IDC says.

Meanwhile, emerging markets that once held the greatest potential for growth are flattening out, and some actually declined last year. They’ll start growing again this year, but only by a little through 2017. It was worse in the U.S., where shipments declined by 7.6 percent.

One thing that might give the corporate market some badly needed pep: The end of support by Microsoft of Windows XP, which kicks in this year.

Both Taipei-based computer companies have been making a difficult entry into the smartphone market, as they seek to diversify outside the slowing PC industry. Acer and Asustek face fierce competition from well-known mobile brands like Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. and low-cost Chinese white box manufacturers.

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The Taiwanese company went on a buying spree through the noughties, swallowing up competitors like Gateway and Packard Bell to help it become the world’s second largest PC maker by shipments in 2010, second only to Hewlett-Packard Co.

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That’s the assessment of market research firm Gartner, whose PC market data was released today. It’s also roughly in line with data released by research firm IDC on Friday.

First, the quarterly rankings: Gartner was notable in the third quarter of 2012 for giving the top spot in the market to China’s Lenovo, while HP remained atop the IDC ranking. The difference is that IDC counts workstations — tricked-out professional PCs — while Gartner does not.

Gartner says HP may have sacrificed some profit margins to hold on to market share, while Lenovo’s growth rate kept it under pressure. Dell’s year-on-year PC sales on a unit basis cratered by more than 20 percent.

Obviously, Windows 8 didn’t spur any growth. And a lot of hope for getting PC sales going north again lies in smaller, lighter devices like Ultrabooks and convertible tablets — notebooks with detachable displays. But the fact is that dedicated tablets like the iPad have taken the life out of PC sales for a few years in a row now.

Here’s the table for the full year. The notable figure here is the 6.7 percent decline in units sales for HP, which is nearly twice the size of the industry’s decline as a whole. HP won the year, but it sure looks like it hurt.

As analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy put it: “This shows two things. First, when HP decides to stem the flow of PC market share loss, they can and did it with a much-improved PC line-up. Second, it demonstrates that Lenovo, who for a time looked infallible, is actually human in the PC space.”

That has caused many shareholders and analysts to reconsider the notion that HP might fare better broken up into pieces than as a single company. In a research note to clients today, Toni Sacconaghi considers HP on a sum-of-parts basis and concludes that the company could be worth as much as $29 a share, which amounts to a premium of more than 88 percent from its closing share price of $15.39 on Tuesday.

How does he get to that valuation? First, the PC business: Based on the assumption that the PC business is worth a valuation of 0.2 times sales in HP’s latest 12-month period — valuations at which IBM, Gateway and eMachines all sold their PC businesses to acquirers, and units that all had lower profit margins than HP does today — he concludes that HP’s PC business is worth about $7.1 billion, or about $3.70 a share.

For printing, he compared HP’s business to that of Lexmark and Xerox and, assuming it should trade at a 15 percent discount to those two — HP has a bigger consumer printing business that faces bigger challenges, Sacconaghi argues — he valued that business at $16.3 billion, or about $8.30 a share. Add another $15.50 a share for enterprise hardware and support, plus $5 for enterprise services, then take back about $3.70 a share for some accounting adjustments, and you end up with about $29 a share.

Yet even if, on this basis, HP is arguably worth more in pieces than it is as a whole, Sacconaghi writes that a breakup is still unlikely in the immediate future. Also, CEO Meg Whitman has said repeatedly that she sees the company staying together. Even so, it’s hard not to wonder about her commitment to that, after some new language about the “potential disposition of assets” that aren’t meeting targets emerged in HP’s latest 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Whatever Whitman’s thinking on the subject, Sacconaghi says she has time. “We believe that Meg Whitman and current management have 12-24 months to attempt to effect a turnaround at HP before management, the Board, or activist investors might look to break up the company to unlock shareholder value.”

If it does happen, he sees two scenarios. One is to sell the PC business to Lenovo or a private equity group, and then spin out the printer business to “harvest cash,” while retaining the enterprise and services businesses. The other option: Spin them both out.

And if it were to happen, it wouldn’t be easy, Sacconaghi says: “A breakup of any kind requires substantial effort and can have material potential costs along two dimensions: (1) spinning out businesses could lead to dis-synergies, as corporate functions need to be duplicated across two companies and scale is reduced. (2) disruption from a sale/spin-off could negatively affect performance (and therefore value) in the near term.”

Or, as Neil Sedaka so famously sang a half century ago, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”

But while sitting down with Acer President Jim Wong yesterday at CES, we discussed that other tablet maker. No, not Apple — Microsoft.

Acer, in case you haven’t been following this, has been one of the more outspoken hardware partners of Microsoft when it comes to the Windows 8 operating system and Surface tablet.

In October, Acer CEO JT Wang told Microsoft to “think twice” about its Surface tablet. Fast-forward to the end of the year, after Windows 8 had launched, and Acer was one of a few computer makers expressing disappointment in sales, saying, “There was not a huge spark in the market. … It’s a slow start, there’s no question.”

Now Wong believes that Microsoft’s promotion of the Surface has been “confusing to consumers.”

“The promotion of the product is really focused on the keyboard, and the users really don’t know how to maximize the touch experience,” Wong said. (Wong has said before that he believes that touchscreens have irreversibly changed — and will soon dominate — the PC market).

Wong went on to point out that when Apple launched the iPad, it was just the iPad — without a lot of talk about accessory keyboards.

Acer’s chief marketing officer, Michael Birkin, echoed this. “There was just a lot of messaging coming out at the same time: Windows 8, Surface, RT,” he said.

Still, Wong struck a (somewhat) hopeful note. “It was disappointing, but we have to work closely with Microsoft to get customer feedback on what works and what doesn’t,” he concluded, adding that Acer has set up “experience” booths overseas to educate consumers on the company’s Windows 8 products.

Microsoft has not yet responded to requests for comment on Wong’s remarks or Windows 8 sales.

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Speaking to reporters in Tokyo on Friday, Fujitsu President Masami Yamamoto said initial consumer demand for Windows 8 has been “weak,” and that the uninspired consumer response to it is partially responsible for the company missing its PC shipment target. Fujitsu had previously expected PC shipments for the year ending March 31 to top out at seven million units. Now it expects somewhere around six million.

Yamamoto’s remarks follow similarly disappointed comments from Acer and Asus. Last week, Emmanuel Fromont, head of PC maker Acer’s America’s division, told the New York Times that Windows 8 sales were not what the company had hoped for. “There was not a huge spark in the market,” Fromont said. “It’s a slow start, there’s no question.”

And in late November, Asus CFO David Chang baldly told AllThingsD sister site The Wall Street Journal, “Demand for Windows 8 is not that good right now.”

Asus and Acer are the fourth- and fifth-largest PC makers in the world, so these complaints are troubling, to say the least. That Fujitsu, the world’s third-largest IT services provider, is now adding to them makes it clear that Windows 8 hasn’t come close to driving the PC sales turnaround for which the industry had hoped. And it belies to some extent the optimistic narrative coming out of Microsoft these days. Back in October, CEO Steve Ballmer said the response to Windows 8 around the world had been “incredible.”

“We’re seeing preliminary demand well above where we were with Windows 7, which is gratifying,” Ballmer said. “We’re seeing retailers here in the United States and hardware manufacturers enthusiastic about the response.”

“Enthusiastic” hardly seems an appropriate adjective for any of the responses detailed above.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment about Yamamoto’s remarks or Windows 8 sales.

The world’s fourth-largest PC maker by shipments hopes to be the first big-brand company to launch a tablet priced to jostle with Chinese white-box tablet makers for consumers in developing countries.

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I am a college student in the market for a non-clunky laptop. I have a pretty limited budget, $500 or less. I will be using it primarily for research and writing Word documents for school. I’m not into editing videos or pictures or downloading games and such but I do want one that can play DVDs, and don’t want something with too small or too large of a screen.

A:

Your price range eliminates Macs and the least “clunky” Windows laptops, but there are plenty of choices among Windows PCs around the $500 range. With a budget-driven purchase like this, it’s best to go to a store and actually eyeball the machines, to see which ones have screens and keyboards you favor. I’d also try to stick with name brands, like Acer or Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard or Lenovo. But bear in mind that to get the most out of the new Windows 8 operating system that comes on nearly all laptops now, you will want a touchscreen.

Q:

We would like to purchase a laptop for our 16-year-old to do school work, surf the Internet and play games. I also want to trade in my five-year-old desktop for a Windows laptop for my home business that will run Microsoft Office and surf the Internet. I’m concerned about switching over to Windows 8 as the reviews have been very mixed and I don’t have time or patience to learn a whole new way of performing basic tasks. We welcome any advice.

A:

You can still buy a Windows 7 laptop, which will be much more familiar to operate, from places like Amazon.com or Best Buy’s Web site.

Q:

I was hoping Microsoft’s new Surface tablet would include my two must-haves: a place for a flash drive and the ability to run Adobe Acrobat. It has the USB port for flash drives, so I can carry work files, but can the Adobe software be downloaded to a flash drive and used with the Surface tablet?

A:

Whether it resides in the Surface’s internal storage or on a flash drive, Adobe Acrobat won’t run on the current Surface, formally called Surface RT, unless and until Adobe creates a so-called new-style Windows 8, tablet-like version of the program. However, in January, Microsoft is expected to introduced a Surface Pro tablet which will be able to run traditional Windows programs like Acrobat. The downside: It will be heavier and possibly costlier.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

At $200, Acer’s C7 bests Samsung’s recently debuted second-gen Chromebook by 50 bucks, which could sway cost-conscious consumers.

But cutting cost corners has its drawbacks, namely in the hardware department. The C7 comes with an Intel Celeron processor and a traditional hard drive — in other words, more “old-school” components, compared to Samsung’s dual-core ARM-powered book and solid-state hard drive.

So, naturally, it raises the age-old techie question: Can you take the performance hit in order to save a few bucks up front?

For what it’s worth, the laptops aren’t meant to be your primary computer. Since Google first introduced the Chromebook at its I/O developer conference a few years ago, the company has positioned the device as an entry point to Google’s cloud services. Think “retail, enterprise, schools and call centers,” Google SVP Sundar Pichai told AllThingsD when first announcing the second-generation Chromebooks.

As an added bonus, both Acer and Samsung offer free 12-day passes to use Gogo’s in-flight Wi-Fi service, as well as two years of 100 gigabytes of free storage on Google’s Drive service. Talk about pushing customers to the cloud.

Acer’s new Chromebooks go up for sale tomorrow, available through the Google Play Web store, as well as from Best Buy retailers.

After all, Microsoft had spent three decades sticking to PC software, letting others make the machines. Even Microsoft’s longtime hardware partners had just a brief heads-up.

But Microsoft had spent the past couple of years laying the groundwork for the device, which hits shelves on Friday, alongside Windows 8 PCs from Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo. At $499, Microsoft is taking direct aim at the iPad with its Surface, but it will also put pressure on all of those longtime PC partners.

So, just how did Surface come to be? Much of Microsoft’s hardware knowledge came from products that were either obscure or of little notice. The company had been building mice and keyboards for decades, but has been expanding its expertise in recent years.

Though no PCs have ever been sold under Microsoft’s brand until now, the company actually has had its hand in the manufacturing and design of several computers handed out at its more recent developer conferences.

Its first venture was a convertible touchscreen laptop built with Acer. That machine, handed out at the Professional Developer Conference in 2009, featured all kinds of connectivity options, and was the first that could run Microsoft’s operating system out of the box without any custom drivers.

A second machine, an Asus tablet, was the first computer of its size to have its screen optically bonded in the way that Surface does.

At last year’s Build conference, Microsoft handed out a custom version of Samsung’s Slate PC. On the outside, it resembled the already-shipping product, but Angiulo notes that Microsoft had made a ton of changes on the inside, cramming in all kinds of additional sensors and connectivity options.

Microsoft also learned from a different Surface. While the tablet bears little resemblance to the first tabletop computer that had that name, Microsoft learned a lot about screen technology when it worked with Samsung on a second-generation table introduced in January 2011. Unlike the first projection system-based table, the second Surface table was a flat touchscreen, optically bonded to its cover.

But despite Microsoft’s long love affair with tablets, the plan for Surface is a relatively new one, dating back only to when Microsoft started planning for Windows 8.

Windows chief Steven Sinofsky believed that the company needed its own hardware to show off the new-look operating system. To head the project, he tapped Panos Panay, a veteran of the company’s hardware unit.

“We started with a blank sheet of paper,” Panay said. Actually, the first real prototype was a bunch of sheets of paper — a notebook that had a cardboard kickstand attached with a screen.

From there, the team fashioned all kinds of prototypes, fabricating hundreds of 3-D-printed plastic models before settling on the final design. Even after showing off the machine on June 18, the team made at least one significant change to the device’s outer casing.

While the design evolved over time, many of its key specifications were dictated by decisions early on. One such move, for example, was the decision to keep a full-size USB port on the device.

Including the port meant that the device could only be so thin, but Panay said that Microsoft wanted to keep its heritage, as well as compatibility with millions of USB devices.

“A USB port is part of our brand,” Panay said. And, beyond that, it’s a pretty darn useful means of connecting to cameras, printers, mice, and all other manner of devices.

“It seems silly to walk away from what we’ve been committed to,” Panay said. Of course, the software it runs — Windows RT — is a break from the past. Surface can run Office in a standard Windows desktop, but that’s the only legacy application it will run. All other programs must be the new-style Windows 8 applications — many of which have yet to be developed.

From a culture standpoint, Panay said the key was not just assembling a bunch of smart people, but getting ones that bought into a common vision. Just having a bunch of brilliant people often guarantees lots of conflicting opinions.

“If we didn’t get all our oars in the water and row in one direction, we wouldn’t be here,” Panay said.

Keeping the tablet a secret was somewhat easier for Microsoft than it might have been for other technology companies. Since no one expected a tablet from Microsoft, folks weren’t looking out for it.

The company took basic precautions — not using a Microsoft logo until recently, and not providing more than a couple pieces of the device to any one partner. But the company also decided it didn’t need to hide prototypes inside fake cases, or take other advanced measures.

“There was nobody looking,” Panay said, keenly aware that this was a one-time phenomenon. The team has already increased security in Studio B — the Surface team’s home inside Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond campus.

The company has one more announced product — an Intel-based Surface Pro model running Windows 8, due out in about three months’ time. There are lots of other things in the works, including a rumored phone, but Panay and Sinofsky aren’t talking about those projects.

The duo gush when talking about the initial Surface, though, frequently using words like “perfect” and “beautiful” as they go on about the 200 custom parts, the magnesium case and other features.

It’s the little things, Panay said, pointing out how the Surface can take a video of a meeting, thanks to its rear camera and kickstand. The camera is pointed at a 22-degree upward angle, to offset the device’s tilt. It’s the perfect spy camera, though the company did opt to have a little light indicate when the camera is on.

While Panay hopes the product will inspire others inside Microsoft, as well as the Windows PC ecosystem, his Surface team is playing for the long-term rather than just to light a fire under the computer makers.

“This is not just we are here and then gone,” Panay said.

The spot shows PCs and tablets from the likes of Acer, Lenovo and Sony, including touchscreens which are, in part, intended to make the Windows ecosystem more competitive with devices like Apple’s iPad. The ads (see the video embedded below) starts with a countdown, as if for a rocket launch, but gets stuck on the number 8. It ends by showing a young girl “painting a picture” on a PC screen, and then showing the printed result to an adult, with the tagline “Windows Reimagined.”

The ads come 11 days before Microsoft is expected to officially debut Windows 8 at an event in New York, along with its Surface tablet device — which, oddly enough, is not shown in the ad.

It’s going to take the full buzz-generating capabilities of Microsoft and its partners to reverse the slide in the sales of PCs. Just last week, the market research firms Gartner and IDC reported that PC sales that declined by more than 8 percent from the same period a year ago. The slide in sales has been blamed in part on consumers who have held back on making PC purchases, knowing that a new version of Windows has been in the offing. But rarely in the past has a iteration of Windows significantly reignited PC sales by itself.

Corporations, meanwhile, are more conservative, and tend not to buy machines with the latest version of Windows until it has been upgraded once or twice by Microsoft with a service pack or two.

On top of all that, there has been the ongoing challenge of tablets like the iPad, and others running Google’s Android operating system, that have eaten into sales of PCs, particularly notebooks. Ads for those devices were also in heavy rotation during Sunday’s football games.

Here’s the ad:

Acer postponed the launch of the phone, which runs the Aliyun mobile operating system made by China-based Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

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