According to new research from IDC, Microsoft’s mobile operating system accounted for 3.2 percent of global smartphone shipments in the first quarter. That’s a significant gain from the OS’s performance in the first quarter of 2012, which saw it capture a market share of 2 percent. And it was enough for Windows Phone to unseat BlackBerry from its third-place spot and claim the rank for its own.

Admittedly, ousting BlackBerry wasn’t exactly a difficult task. In the first quarter, the struggling handset maker saw its share of global smartphone shipments halved year over year. In Q1 of 2012, it claimed a 6.4 percent share. This year, BlackBerry managed to snag only 2.9 percent.

An unfortunate loss of momentum for BlackBerry, though one that’s not entirely attributable to the ascension of other platforms and a lack of interest in its own. BlackBerry is in the midst of a transition to an entirely new OS, BlackBerry 10. Right now, the company has just two smartphones that use it. The bulk of its handset portfolio continues to run on its older OS. And according to IDC analyst Kevin Restivo, that’s almost certainly having an effect on sales.

“Windows Phone is clearly gaining momentum,” Restivo told AllThingsD. “But BlackBerry’s decline this quarter really has more to do with the lag between sales of its old handsets and its new ones than anything else. Sure, Windows Phone is ahead now, but there’s no guarantee that it will maintain its third-place ranking in upcoming quarters.”

And, as I’ve noted before, third place in the current smartphone OS rankings doesn’t mean much. According to IDC, Google and Apple captured 92.3 percent of all smartphone shipments with their Android/iOS duopoly (Android: 59.1 percent; iOS: 23 percent). In other words, Windows Phone and BlackBerry are so far behind the two leading mobile platforms that their ranking is really just a moot point, anyway.

The report, obtained in advance by AllThingsD, shows just how different the new generation of mobile games is from the gaming-only devices that previously reigned supreme. For context, back in Q4 2012, total consumer spending on games for iOS and Android devices surpassed spending on “gaming-optimized handhelds” (that is, Sony’s PSP and Vita, and Nintendo’s DS, DSi and 3DS).

But the real bombshell is in the new report, which covers Q1 2013: In that quarter, consumer spending on Sony’s and Nintendo’s handhelds declined significantly, while iOS and Google Play spending both increased, also significantly. Combined, the phone and tablet crowd spent nearly three times as much on games as handheld device owners.

(And bear in mind, of course, that a new 3DS or PS Vita game costs about $40, while even brand-new mobile games are typically free or 99 cents to download, with many offering optional in-game purchases.)

But wait, you say. This is the first quarter of the year, being compared to the lucrative holiday-driven fourth quarter. How is that fair to Sony and Nintendo?

Exactly. It’s not. With slower game production schedules and much lower device turnover, the holiday quarter matters a great deal to Nintendo and Sony. But for consumers with a steady stream of new games and newer, better devices on which to play those games, seasonality is mostly irrelevant.

IDC and App Annie’s numbers, then, amount to a double whammy: At both the best of times and the worst of times, new-school mobile games beat out their older counterparts.

A few other points of interest from the new report:

• The global install base for those “gaming-optimized handhelds” was about 200 million in Q1 2013. To put that in perspective, Gartner estimates that more than 2 billion phones and tablets are being/will be shipped this year alone. In other words, it’s through volume that mobile devices have closed and blown past the revenue-per-user gap.
• Although the total amount consumers spent on mobile games was far greater on iOS than on Android, gaming amounted to about 80 percent of all consumer spending on Android, vs. about 70 percent on iOS.
• The report splits consumers into four geographic zones: North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. For both Android and gaming-optimized handhelds, the Asia-Pacific share of total spending increased by more than 10 points (see the chart embedded below).

This report is the second such collaboration between IDC, which tracks videogame and entertainment hardware, and App Annie, which tracks mobile software and in-app revenue.

On Friday afternoon, Dell gave an interview to the trade publication CRN (which used to be called Computer Reseller News) crowing about his company’s apparent share gains in the market for servers.

What got him excited was preliminary data (as in, not yet published) from the market research firm IDC, which followed similar findings from another research firm, Gartner (again, not yet published), that supposedly shows healthy gains for Dell and big losses at HP.

According to the numbers Dell shared with CRN, IDC found Dell — No. 2 in the worldwide server market — to have grown its share of the server market to nearly 28 percent, while HP’s fell from north of 35 percent a year to slightly below 31 percent. “HP is losing share at a staggering rate, and they are losing it to Dell,” Dell proclaimed.

HP, which had led the segment for the better part of two decades, didn’t respond to Dell’s claims. But it did respond a day earlier, after Dell enterprise chief Marius Haas gave a similar interview — again to CRN — claiming similar data from Gartner. “One quarter does not a trend make. … 17 years is a trend,” retorted Jim Ganthier, a marketing exec in HP’s server group.

Dell hasn’t bothered to wait for either research firm to finalize and publish their data, and I’ve asked both firms to comment on that. I’m no expert in the processes these firms follow, but from what I understand, execs at companies like Dell, HP and IBM see these “preliminary” figures before they get published in order to give the company a chance to dispute them if they vary from what’s really going on. When Gartner and IDC get around to publishing press releases, expect Dell to make a second push on this topic, and maybe give more interviews.

Dell naturally has an urge to pounce on HP and score a few punches. HP has been using the occasion of Dell’s $24.4 billion leveraged-buyout plan to create uncertainty among Dell customers. Way back on Feb. 5, when the buyout plan was first floated, HP issued a statement saying, “Leveraged buyouts tend to leave existing customers and innovation at the curb. We believe Dell’s customers will now be eager to explore alternatives, and HP plans to take full advantage of that opportunity.”

With IBM said to be in on-again, off-again talks with China’s Lenovo to sell its industry-standard server business, and Dell going private, HP is arguing that it is the one major vendor not engaged in a significant corporate shake-up, and thus able to focus most on its customers’ needs. Indeed, HP’s Dave Donatelli led a major Webcast with HP partners last week, touting that very message.

Neither company’s shares are really responding to any of the trash-talking today. HP shares are up slightly this morning to $20.76 a share, while Dell shares are also up a little to $13.35, or about 30 cents below the $13.65 buyout price that Michael Dell and private-equity firm Silver Lake have offered to take the company private.

“I don’t think anybody has done a product that is the product that I see customers wanting. You can go through the products from all those guys … and none of them has a product that you can really use. Not Apple. Not Google. Not Amazon. … [Surface] is a first-class tablet that people can enjoy and appreciate. It’s a PC; it’s a tablet. It’s for play; it’s for work. It’s got a great price. That product doesn’t exist today.”

– Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Microsoft is now one of the Top 5 tablet vendors worldwide, thanks to its Surface RT and Surface Pro devices — but not because either one is selling particularly well.

Research firm IDC says Microsoft shipped about 900,000 Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets in the first quarter of the year. That was enough to claim a fifth-place ranking on IDC’s latest worldwide tablet tracker, but with a very low percentage of the tablet market — just 1.8 percent.

That’s a pretty poor showing for a device that has been available since last October, though, to be fair, the Surface Pro didn’t begin shipping in North America until February. That late start almost certainly hampered sales.

That said, Microsoft shipped “just shy” of 900,000 Surface units last quarter, according to IDC, so the availability of the Pro version of the device doesn’t seem to have done all that much for sales. With both the Pro and the RT on the market, Microsoft’s tablet sales don’t even begin to come close to market leaders like Apple and Samsung, which shipped 19.5 million and 8.8 million tablets, respectively.

Not that anyone expected them to. Surface is a latecomer in a highly competitive market dominated by a company with a massive first-mover advantage. Still, you’d think that if Surface really did hit the sweet spot that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described in the quote above, shipments would be a wee bit higher, no? Clearly, the company has got a lot of work ahead of it if it hopes to change users’ expectations for tablets.

Microsoft, which has not yet disclosed any Surface sales data or guidance, did not respond to a request for comment.

Intel shares have traded lower since last Thursday, when the market research firms IDC and Gartner said they had tracked one of the largest year-on-year declines in sales of personal computers since records have been kept. Intel is the largest supplier of microprocessors to PC manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, and it’s hard to see how much good news it can possibly bring to the table today.

Analysts are expecting Intel to report a profit of 41 cents per share on sales of $12.6 billion, and missing either would be seen as more or less proving that the PC market is in a state of permanent decline. So would a weak outlook for the current quarter, for which analysts currently expect earnings of 40 cents on $12.9 billion in sales.

There are other aspects to Intel’s business. It has a healthy data center business selling chips for use in servers, but out of more than $53 billion in sales last year, $34 billion, or more than 61 percent, was in its “client,” or PC, unit, while the data center group accounted for about $10.7 billion.

In the past, Intel executives have quarreled with the analyst firms, and said it was seeing more promising conditions in emerging markets. Indeed, in prior years there has been a disconnect between the dour pronouncements of Gartner and IDC and the peppier market conditions that Intel would later describe in its financial results in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia. In more recent quarters, the differences between their views have narrowed.

Aside from PCs, Intel has some new ideas that it hopes will kick its data center business into a higher gear. And it certainly has higher hopes about selling more chips for use in phones and tablets, but as yet they’re only hopes. It also plans to launch a TV product later this year.

Aside from the numbers, expect some questions — and maybe even some answers, but probably nothing conclusive yet — about the search for a replacement for CEO Paul Otellini. The smart money says the choice will be an internal one (here’s a rundown on the contenders), though there’s a slim chance that Intel’s board might be in the mood to surprise everyone and name an outsider. But don’t bet any money you can’t afford to lose on that.

Yesterday’s reports from the market research firms IDC and Gartner showed conclusively what pretty much anyone paying attention had already suspected — that the bottom has finally fallen out of the PC business. During the first quarter of 2013, the combined shipments showed their worst year-on-year decline ever.

Reversing that trend is probably not an option, which means that a fundamentally new chapter in the history of the personal computer industry is unequivocally here. Shareholders in those companies will start making value judgments accordingly. That was in evidence in the premarket trading this morning.

With a few minutes to go before the opening of markets in New York, shares of market leader Hewlett-Packard were down by nearly 6 percent. Dell, still the subject of an ongoing fight over its proposed $24.4 billion plan to go private in a leveraged buyout transaction, was down only slightly.

Chipmaker Intel was down nearly 3 percent. Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s one remaining rival, was down 2.7 percent. Microsoft, the primary supplier of operating system software to the world’s PCs, was down 3.5 percent.

Apple, the maker of the iPad, which arguably has disrupted the PC industry, but is also North America’s third-largest supplier of PCs, was down by $2, or less than half of a percentage point.

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.

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.

A new report from IDC claims that tablets running Google’s Android operating system will finally knock the iPad from its throne by year’s end. The market research outfit expects global tablet shipments to rise to 190.9 million in 2013, up from an earlier forecast of 172.4 million. Of those, it predicts that 48.8 percent will be Android tablets. And it believes the iPad will relinquish a portion of the 51 percent market share it claimed last year, slipping to 46 percent. (Caveat 1: IDC’s forecast is based on shipments into the channel, not sales; Apple sells pretty much every iPad it ships. The same cannot be said of Android tablet vendors.)

IDC says that trend of iPad ceding market share to rivals will continue in the ensuing years, with the tablet’s share slipping to 43.5 percent by 2017. Android will have begun to see declines by this time, as well, with its share slipping a few percentage points to 46 percent, as tablets running Microsoft’s Windows OS begin to gain traction (Caveat 2: The number of Android tablets on the market far, far outnumber the iPad of which there are essentially three models).

Of course, by 2017 global tablet shipments will be upward of 350 million, so while Apple may have a smaller share of the tablet market than it does today, it will be selling more tablets than ever before. Same thing for OEMs peddling Android tablets. At that point, what does it matter who’s king of the mountain, when two players are nearly splitting a market of 350 million down the middle? (Caveat 3: Usage metrics — A, B, C, D — suggests Android’s tablet ascendancy may not be all that meaningful)

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.

On Monday, BlackBerry began selling the Z10 in India for 43,490 rupees — about $805. That’s a price point that puts the device squarely in competiion with Apple’s iPhone 5, which starts at 45,500 rupees — about $844. An interesting move for BlackBerry, whose popularity in the Indian market has traditionally been driven not just by its widely used messenger service, but by handsets that were comparatively lower in price than those from Apple and Samsung.

Of course, as I’ve noted here before, price seems to be increasingly less of an issue for consumers in India. Earlier this month, IDC analyst Ryan Reith told AllThingsD that the research firm had seen “overwhelming demand” for the iPhone 5 in India. (Still an issue for some, though, according to Twitter.)

So the market for high-end smartphones in the country clearly exists. The challenge for BlackBerry is to convince consumers there that the Z10 and the BlackBerry 10 OS on which it runs deserve a spot in it. That might be tougher than expected for the company, whose share of the Indian smartphone market declined to about 5 percent last quarter. Not only is BlackBerry going up against Apple, which is expanding its presence in the country, it’s taking on Samsung, which has captured a 40 percent share.

But if the company is able to pull it off and tap deeply into the Indian smartphone market, the rewards will undoubtedly be great. IDC expects the Indian smartphone market to hit 108 million units in 2016, about five times its size now.

In a research note issued this week, IDC released its metrics for the 2012 “smart connected devices” market, which it defines as desktop and portable PCs, tablets and smartphones. And they show that Samsung’s shipments of those devices exceeded Apple’s, thanks to an 86 percent increase in year-over-year growth. (Caveat: Samsung reports device shipments; Apple reports device sales. There’s a big difference.)

Samsung shipped 250 million “smart connected devices” in 2012, up from 114 million in the year prior, to claim a 20.8 percent share of the market. Meanwhile, Apple shipped 218.7 million devices, up from 151.5 million in 2011, to capture an 18 percent share.

The engine of Samsung’s growth? Spiking smartphone shipments, according to IDC. Samsung shipped more than anyone in 2012. And while Apple led the market in tablet shipments, sales weren’t high enough to match and surpass the gains Samsung charted.

Same old story, right? The two juggernauts slugging it out in a battle for “smart connected devices” profits. Absolutely. But what’s interesting is just how vast Samsung’s and Apple’s lead in this market is. Remember, IDC defines “connected devices” as desktop and portable PCs, tablets and smartphones. And there are other big players in that space. Companies like Hewlett-Packard that once owned the personal computer market. But the market share of these incumbents is far surpassed by that of Samsung and Apple.

Lenovo, for example, ranked third after Apple, but with a market share of just 6.5 percent. Hewlett-Packard ranked fourth with 4.8 percent, down 8.5 percent year over year. And Dell brought up the rear, placing fifth with a 3.2 percent share. Piddling showings, all three, and evidence of a common strategic blunder: A long bet on traditional PCs, when rivals like Apple and Samsung were shifting their product emphasis to smartphones and tablets.

Airtel

In the fourth quarter, iPhone shipments to India were about three to four times what they were in the third quarter, according to new research from IDC. And the research house expects them to grow roughly 150 percent year over year in 2013.

“We have seen overwhelming demand for Apple iPhone in India, not just for the latest iPhone 5, but also the lower cost previous versions,” IDC analyst Ryan Reith told AllThingsD. “It’s a huge market with great opportunity for Apple.”

The reason for this growth? The new iPhone 5, obviously. But also a more aggressive approach to a big market that Apple has typically shied away from because of its price sensitivity and a distribution model the company previously found unappealing.

In India, Apple sells iPhones on the open market, not through carriers that subsidize them and in so doing lower their selling price. And while India is among the fastest-growing wireless markets in the world, it’s also highly price-sensitive. That’s been problematic for Apple, which has traditionally been unwilling to cut prices to drive volume.

But recently Apple has been working with Indian distributors to offer installment-based payment plans for the iPhone. And it has significantly ramped up its marketing efforts in the country, in some cases working directly with distributors on advertisements. Apple did this with TheMobileStore, a national retail chain that operates 1,000 outlets across India, and CEO Himanshu Chakrawarti tells AllThingsD the effort was a success.

“Following the launch of iPhone 5, we met Apple, and both of us felt that we could significantly energize entry to mid-level smartphone buyers to upgrade to an iPhone,” Chakrawarti said. “[We ran a campaign] in January 2013 that was very successful. Our sales jumped about 200 percent.”

Evidently, Apple is seeing some decent early results from such efforts, though clearly it has its work cut out for it. The company has a piddling share of India’s smartphone market, which is currently dominated by archrival Samsung. But it seems to be working to change that — as much as it can afford to right now, anyway.

As CEO Tim Cook noted on Apple’s last earnings call, India is not as high a priority as certain other markets, like China.

“I love India, but I believe that Apple has some higher potential in the intermediate term in some other countries,” Cook said. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not putting emphasis in India — we are. We have a business there; that business is growing, but the multilayer distribution there really adds to the cost of getting products to market. So we’re going to continue putting some energies there, but from my own perspective, in the intermediate term there will be larger opportunities outside of there.”

For one thing, there are questions about CEO succession. Current CEO Paul Otellini (pictured) surprised everyone in November when he announced plans to retire well before it was expected. All the smart money is being placed on an internal successor being named, though Intel’s board of directors will give at least some consideration to outsiders. Here’s a pretty thorough list.

Management issues aside, Intel has a more fundamental question to struggle with: The personal computer industry, to which Intel has long been the primary arms merchant, is contracting. Data from both Gartner and IDC showed a market that shrank in 2012 by more than 3 percent — or about 13 million units. And there’s little sign of that changing.

The damage to the PC industry is being wrought by tablets and smartphones, markets where Intel has yet to penetrate with chips of its own in any meaningful way. At the International CES, Intel showed off its Lexington and Bay Trail generations of mobile chips. Impressive as they may be — one attraction is to bring the x86 instruction set that is a fundamental underpinning of mainstream PCs to tablets and phones — the chips won’t be inside any devices on store shelves until late this year.

It didn’t impress analysts at Piper Jaffray, who wrote in a research note to clients, wrapping up their impressions of CES, that the base of customers the new chips will attract is “not likely large enough to move the needle for the company,” and that “we continue to be concerned about the rate of cannibalization from tablets. We believe it is unlikely that 2013 sees any renewed interest in PCs.”

Meanwhile, Intel has one business that is largely safe from a meaningful competitive threat: Servers. Yes, it’s safe for now, but not entirely. Server chips using technology licensed from ARM — the British chip-design firm whose technology is found in most all of those non-Intel mobile devices — are on the way and, if nothing else, looking like an interesting option for the not-so-distant future.

The uncertainty has certainly weighed on Intel’s shares, which fell by more than 8 percent in 2012 but have since recovered. The shares were up more than 1 percent today in trading on the Nasdaq to $22.41 by midday in New York.

So what does the Street expect today? Per-share earnings of 45 cents on revenue of $13.53 billion. However, there are whispered numbers making the rounds, suggesting that Intel may fall short. That would be rare, as Intel typically beats the Street, even in tough quarters. But then, this isn’t just any tough quarter.

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.”

Despite all the hype, PC sales during the year’s most important buying season remained as sluggish as ever. In fact, for the first time in a half-decade, PC sales declined in the fourth quarter. Vendor rankings remained the same, with Hewlett-Packard ranked first in PC shipments, followed by Lenovo, Dell and Acer.

PC makers sold 89.8 million units globally in the fourth quarter of 2012, down 6.4 percent from the same quarter in 2011, according to new figures from IDC. Sales for the year also slipped, falling from about 364 million in 2011 to 352 million in 2012. That’s a 3.2 percent drop.

Why the decline? A number of reasons: Continuing economic woes obviously had some effect on sales, as did consumers’ increasing fascination with tablets and smartphones. But IDC also thinks PC makers blew it by not releasing compelling new hardware to take advantage of Windows 8’s new features.

“Consumers expected all sorts of cool PCs with tablet- and touch-optimized capabilities,” IDC research director David Daoud explained. “Instead, they mostly saw traditional PCs that feature a new OS (Windows 8) optimized for touch and tablet, with applications and hardware that are not yet able to fully utilize these capabilities.”

In other words, it was going to be a tough quarter to begin with. But PC makers didn’t do themselves any favors by failing to capitalize on the benefits of Windows 8, or at least explaining them well to consumers.

And that will likely remain a challenge in the year ahead. For 2013, IDC forecasts a meager 2.8 percent growth in PC sales.

IDC pegged semiconductor revenue this year at $304 billion, up less than 1 percent. In July, the research firm forecast world-wide growth of 4.6 percent.

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“Apple iOS devices are being brought into the enterprise in droves, both by corporate and by employee purchase,” IDC explained. “In fact, [we believe] that by the end of 2012, iOS will be the number 1 corporate-liable operating system (OS) device by volumes shipped.” And the top employee-liable mobile-device OS? Android. (“Corporate-liable” is research-house jargon for “company-owned”; “employee-liable” means “employee-owned.”)

To be clear: The BlackBerry’s installed base in enterprise remains far larger than those of its rivals, but the iPhone will surpass the BlackBerry by volume of devices shipped to enterprise by year’s end.

Ugly news for RIM. But with the consumerization of IT in full swing and more companies offering “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) plans to their employees, it was inevitable.

By losing the smartphone battle in the consumer market, RIM has lost its footing in the enterprise market it long dominated. Now it must fight for relevance in a broader market that’s essentially an estuary of the two. And that’s a tough place to be for a company that’s transitioning to a competitive mobile OS years later than it should have.

“While corporate customers will continue to offer Blackberry as a corporate-liable device, they are also now much more open to offering iOS as well, and giving end users a choice of devices,” IDC Mobile Enterprise Program Manager Stacy Crook told AllThingsD. “From a BYOD standpoint, the BlackBerrys will also continue to easily make the approved device list, but again, most companies with a BYOD strategy will allow for iOS and, increasingly, Android is starting to make more of those lists, as well. In either of these scenarios, it boils down to end-user choice, so the end users have to want to choose the BlackBerry device over the others.”

And these days, fewer and fewer are making that choice. Which is why strong adoption of BlackBerry 10 is crucial to RIM’s longevity. The “You Will Use a BlackBerry and That’s an Order” market is disappearing, whittled down by corporations’ widening embrace of BYOD. RIM’s battle for the enterprise space is increasingly becoming the same one it already lost in the consumer space. And it can ill afford to lose it a second time.

BlackBerry 10 really needs to be “a quantum leap over anything that’s out there,” to quote former RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie.

According to RIM, it will be. And the company, for its part, says it has no intention of forfeiting the enterprise market to anyone.

“BlackBerry continues to be the best mobile platform for business, providing a complete enterprise mobility solution, including smartphones and tablets managed by a scalable, reliable and highly secure software platform,” the company said in a statement given to AllThingsD. “Our infrastructure is trusted by some of the most security conscious organisations in the U.S. and over 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies. We’ve been meeting with many of our top enterprise customers and they are excited about BlackBerry 10 and its potential.”

Does this signal a comeback for Sony, the brand once synonymous with the coolest gadgets?

Probably not.

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Nokia ranked as the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in IDC’s second-quarter survey. But in the research firm’s third-quarter report, it didn’t even place in the Top 5. And the company’s share losses have bolstered the gains of the smartphone market’s two juggernauts: Samsung and Apple.

During the third quarter, Samsung shipped 56.3 million smartphones globally, for a 31.3 percent share of the market. That’s up from 22.7 percent in the third quarter of last year. Meanwhile, Apple shipped 26.9 million smartphones to claim a 15 percent share, up from 13.8 percent a year ago.

Rounding out IDC’s smartphone Top 5: Research In Motion, ZTE and HTC, all three with relatively piddling market shares. RIM claimed third place, with a 4.3 percent market share, down from 9.6 percent last year. ZTE took fourth, with 4.2 percent. And HTC managed to nab fifth, with 4 percent.

Looking at the broader market, smartphone manufacturers shipped 179.7 million devices in the third quarter, up 45.3 percent from 123.7 million units in the same quarter last year. Meanwhile, the overall mobile phone market grew 2.4 percent year over year, with shipments of 444.5 million.

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:

IDC, which had previously been looking for global tablet shipments of 107 million for the year, on Wednesday raised that by 9 percent. It now expects tablet shipments to hit 117.1 million units this year. That’s a nearly 70 percent increase over the 69 million tablets shipped last year.

Significant annual gains will follow. IDC figures tablet shipments top out at 165.9 million in 2013, up from its prior estimate of 142 million. And by 2016, shipments could hit 261 million. Unsurprisingly, Apple and Google stand to benefit the most from this trend. IDC figures Apple will claim 60 percent of the tablet market this year and cede just 2 percent of it in the years that follow, for a share of 58 percent by 2016. It expects Android to capture 35 percent of the market this year and to be holding on to a 30.5 percent share four years from now.

So where will that lost share end up? With Microsoft.

IDC reckons Windows-based tablet will carve out a 4 percent share in 2012 and extend that to 11 percent by 2016. “Tablets running Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 and RT operating systems, including the company’s own Surface tablets, will add some momentum,” IDC analyst Jennifer Song explains. “However, we expect shipments to remain low in the fourth quarter as high prices and consumer confusion around these devices will limit their appeal.”

According to a new survey from market research firm Analysys International, Chinese consumers purchased 2.34 million tablets during the second quarter of 2012, a 63 percent increase over the previous year. And of those 2.34 million tablets, 72.6 percent of were iPads.

That’s a commanding lead, so much so that none of the rival tablet makers Analysys tracked managed to crack even a 10 percent share. Lenovo, ranked second to Apple, captured a market share of only 8.38 percent. And Samsung couldn’t even manage half of that, claiming a share of just 3.59 percent — table scraps.

Generally, a pretty surprising finding given the number and range of cheaper tablet options sold in the country.

Analysys’s survey of the Chinese tablet market follows, by a week, IDC’s analysis of the global tablet market, which found Apple to have nearly as commanding a lead worldwide. According to IDC, Apple captured a 61.5 percent share of the global tablet market in the second quarter.

(Chart via Digitimes)