According to NPD, Apple shipped 17.2 million mobile PCs* worldwide during the first quarter of 2012, enough to capture a 22.5 percent share of the market — more than double that of its closest rival, Hewlett-Packard. During the same period, HP shipped just 8.9 million mobile PCs for an 11.6 percent market share.

How did Apple manage to dominate PC leader HP in the mobile PC market? The iPad.

Of the 17.2 million “mobile PCs” Apple shipped, 13.6 million were iPads. And in that particular segment of the market — tablets — Apple’s domination is unrelenting. In the first quarter, Apple claimed a stunning 62.8 percent share of the tablet market, dwarfing every single one of its rivals. Samsung, its next closest rival, shipped just 1.6 million tablets during the quarter, for a share of 7.5 percent. Amazon followed with 900,000 tablets shipped and a 4 percent share. Bringing up the rear: Research In Motion and Asus, which sold 500,000 tablets each, for a 2.3 percent market share.

*NPD defines mobile PCs as tablets and laptops.

That’s according to the latest data from the NPD Group’s retail tracking service. Sales of 3-D TVs in the U.S. grew 74 percent in units over last year, with 3-D TVs accounting for 11 percent of all flat-panel sales in the first quarter of 2012, the report says.

But despite the growth in sales, and the fact that some consumers are wowed by 3-D demos, “just 14 percent of consumers … say 3D is a ‘must have’ feature while 68 percent say it’s a ‘nice feature to have they may use in the future.’”

The obstacles to greater 3-D penetration are the usual suspects, NPD analyst Ben Arnold says. The overwhelming majority of consumers consider 3-D glasses a drawback to the technology, with glasses-free 3-D still far from being perfected; 14 percent say the lack of 3-D content is a deterrent (though that reason is weakening, as more content creators put out 3-D programs).

Cost is also a factor when it comes to newer, souped-up TVs. NPD says the average prices of 3-D TVs in April were 33 percent lower compared to April 2010, but a recent report from IHS iSuppli says that average prices of 3-D LCD TVs actually crept up a teeny bit from December 2011 to April of this year, to $2,492.

So why buy a 3-D TV if you’re not going to use it for 3-D? Well, for one thing, as noted here, “3-D” has been shifting from the main selling point in TV marketing schemes to an add-on feature that happens to be included in high-tech TV sets, so some consumers are buying 3-D-equipped TVs even if they’ve not totally bought into the tech.

And the underutilization of fancy TVs isn’t really a new thing: Turns out that 3-D engagement levels might be in line with some of the data we’ve seen surrounding “smart” TVs, or Internet-connected TVs. Despite the fact that Internet connectivity is often cited as an important factor for consumers making TV purchases, TechNewsDaily reported earlier this year that only half of all people who own Internet-ready TVs have actually gone online through their TVs.

(Image courtesy of Salminari on Flickr; thought bubble courtesy of AllThingsD)

That’s the latest forecast from NPD DisplaySearch, which anticipates a massive uptick in tablet adoption over the next few years, one that will ultimately vault the device’s market share over the PC’s. The research outfit figures tablet shipments will grow from 81.6 million units in 2011 to 184.2 million in 2013 — significantly more than the 168.9 million NPD had originally predicted.

And by 2017, NPD expects them to hit 424.9 million units, exceeding notebook PC shipments — for the second year in a row.

The key drivers of that explosive growth: The tablet’s rapidly evolving feature set, and increased investments in the tablet supply chain, as consumer interest in other device categories cools.

“So far in this relatively young product category, the tablet PC market has been dominated by Apple and has tended to include a number of competing products that are similarly configured to the iPad,” says NPD DisplaySearch’s Richard Shim. “However, as the market matures and competitors become better attuned to consumer preferences and find opportunities to break new ground, we expect the landscape to change dramatically, giving consumers more choices, which will drive demand for more devices.”

More choices in hardware, perhaps. But not so much in operating systems.

Over the next five years, NPD sees the tablet market dominated by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, with some small inroads made by Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows RT. By 2017, the firm sees iOS with a 50.9 percent share of the market, Android with a 40.5 percent share, and Windows with a 7.5 percent share.

More than a quarter of current iPad owners say the tablet is the first Apple product they’ve purchased, according to a new survey from the NPD Group. “iPad sales are growing much faster than any other Apple product has this soon after launch,” says NPD’s Ben Arnold. “In fact, one-in-five Apple owner households has one — nearly equivalent to the number that own an Apple computer.”

So the iPad is Apple’s newest ambassador? Not all that big of a surprise considering how well the device has been selling. Apple sold 11.8 million iPads during its most recent quarter — that’s more than double the number it sold last year. More to the point, the newest model was only actually shipping during the last three weeks or so of the quarter. And, as Apple CEO Tim Cook noted during the company’s Tuesday earnings call, iPad supply was constrained at that time.

And sales to date have been fantastic.

“Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million,” Cook said Tuesday. “To put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones, and we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products.”

So is it any surprise that newcomers to the Apple brand are increasingly being introduced to it by the iPad?

According to NPD, 33 percent of U.S. households — or 37 million — currently own Apple products. How large will that percentage be a year from now given the iPad’s sales trend?

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster reports that NPD’s data, which counts only U.S. sales, implies that Mac sales for the March quarter ended down 5 percent year over year. And if that proves to be the case, Apple could potentially miss its Mac number when it posts financials next Tuesday. Caveat: Last quarter, Apple beat NPD data by 14 percentage points — something to keep in mind while mulling Munster’s assertion.

Anyway … the Street is looking for worldwide Mac sales of 4.5 million; Munster figures Apple likely sold less than that — somewhere between 4.1 million to 4.4 million, with sales slowed by a core MacBook Pro and iMac lineup that hasn’t been refreshed in more than a year. Those two product lines alone likely account for about 50 percent of Mac sales, so it’s certainly conceivable that diminishing consumer interest in them might affect Apple’s sales numbers.

But is this really anything to worry about?

Munster himself acknowledges that strong iPhone and iPad sales will more than offset any Mac softness. He still expects the company to beat consensus EPS and revenue estimates and, like many Apple watchers, he sees new Macs headed into the pipeline soon, following on the heels of Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors. Said Munster, “We believe that MacBook, iMac, and potentially MacBook Air, lines could all be refreshed during the June quarter, which we believe would result in a reacceleration of Mac sales.”

Despite some industry gains from January to February, overall sales totaled $1.06 million last month, down from $1.33 billion year over year; software sales fell 23 percent to $464 million, and hardware sales dropped 18 percent to $381.4 million.

February’s best-selling software title was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, from Activision Blizzard.

While most hardware platforms posted declines year over year, “all current-generation platforms improved sales over January 2012 by more than 50 percent,” NPD said in a note.

A consistent bright spot has been the Microsoft Xbox, which was the best-selling hardware platform for the seventh month in a row. Some 426,000 Xbox units were sold in February, marking the 12th consecutive month Xbox has held more than 40 percent of the current-generation console market share.

And all eyes were on the Sony PlayStation Vita handheld gaming device, which came to market in late February. Only four days of retail sales for the PS Vita were included in this reporting period, but the device gave overall hardware unit sales a month-over-month boost. Not including the PS Vita, hardware unit sales increased by 62 percent over January, NPD said; with PS Vita sales included, the increase was 87 percent.

“More than 1.2 million PS Vita units have been sold globally since launch,” Patrick Seybold, senior director of communications at Sony Computer Entertainment America, said in a statement. “Customer satisfaction rates are very high and momentum will continue as gamers get their hands on a deep lineup of blockbuster titles that take advantage of PS Vita’s unique features, including cross-platform play with the PlayStation 3.”

In January, the videogame industry saw a double-digit decline in physical software sales, as my colleague Tricia Duryee reports, following a number of noteworthy game launches ahead of the holiday season.

That data point comes from NPD, which says 78 million Americans bought music in 2011, up 2 percent from 2010. And that’s the second consecutive year the number has bumped up.

Since CD sales continue to decline, the uptick here comes from the digital side, just like people have been predicting since … forever. NPD says 45 million people bought digital downloads at Apple’s iTunes and Amazon, up 14 percent from 2010.

Given that it’s easier than ever to listen to free music, legally, via streaming options like Pandora and Spotify, the fact that paid downloads are up is a little counterintuitive.

But that’s always been part of the streaming music service pitch to the big labels: Let us give away your stuff, and we’ll help increase demand — just like radio used to do.

We’re starting to hear murmurs from the labels that this is actually how it’s working in the real world, too. Again, too early to tell if it’s a long-term trend, or perhaps just an Adele-inspired bump. But near-term good news is still much better than years of decline.

Zynga was up 42 cents, or almost 5 percent today, to close at $8.87 a share.

That’s a huge reversal from earlier this week when the stock nosedived to an all-time low. Meanwhile, none of the traditional game makers were having such a good day.

Electronic Arts closed down $1.47, or 7.5 percent, to $18.04 a share; THQ fell 7 percent to 66 cents a share; Take-Two Interactive fell .5 percent to $14.50 a share; and industry-leading Activision Blizzard slipped 2.5 percent $12.24 a share. GameStop also traded lower, finishing off the day down 2.8 percent to $23.51 a share.

The game makers were universally feeling the impact of an NPD Group report that revealed yesterday that videogame software sales fell 8 percent in December compared to the same month in 2010. When including hardware and accessories, like game cards, the entire industry contracted by 21 percent year over year.

Potentially, investors were betting that if the traditional game-makers weren’t fairing well, then Zynga was a good bet. The leading Facebook game-maker operates purely online and on mobile, so it potentially would be more isolated from the retail and packaged goods sectors.

The old guard vs. new guard battle also played out on the front lines yesterday.

EA was dealt an additional blow when Zynga announced it had hired away Barry Cottle, head of Electronic Arts’ Interactive division. Cottle, who was in charge of the company’s digital strategy, including social and mobile games, was EA’s biggest weapon in fighting Zynga’s dominance on Facebook and had led EA’s rise on mobile.

But EA’s loss was Zynga’s gain.

The social games leader appointed Cottle to the position of EVP of business and corporate development in charge of new global partnerships, acquisitions and other development roles.

Even the smallest of businesses are considering tablets, though only 54 percent of those with fewer than 50 employees are planning on buying a tablet, compared with 73 percent of all businesses with fewer than 1,000 workers. That last figure is up five percentage points from a quarter earlier, NPD said.

On average, the small businesses surveyed plan to spend around $21,000 on tablets in the coming year, though that amount varies greatly based on the size of the firm.

“Businesses of all sizes appear to be determined to capitalize on the tablet phenomenon,” NPD analyst Stephen Baker said in a statement. “The iPad, just as it is in the consumer market, is synonymous for ‘tablet’ in the business market.”

New research from NPD finds that smartphones are now responsible for more than a quarter of the photos and videos people take in the U.S. About 27 percent of photographs taken in 2011 were captured by smartphones, up from 17 percent last year. Meanwhile, about 44 percent were taken with single-purpose cameras. That’s down from 52 percent in 2010. Standard cellphones, camcorders, webcams and tablets account for the remainder.

So, a significant decline, and one indicative of a trend that’s been emerging for years now: The smartphone as “good enough” camera. With our phones packing increasingly better cameras and improved optics, the reasons for carrying a dedicated point-and-shoot are growing fewer — unless you’re a professional photographer or a hobbyist. And that’s having a deleterious effect on the camera market. According to NPD’s Retail Tracking Service, the point-and-shoot camera market declined 17 percent in units and 18 percent in dollars for the first 11 months of 2011.

The NPD Group released a new report today that calculated the amount of money Americans are spending on games from the nontraditional market. That includes a lot of digital content, such as subscriptions, digital downloads, social games and mobile games, but also used games and rentals.

In the third quarter, it found that the amount spent on that “other content” totaled $1.64 billion.

While significant, NPD said it wasn’t enough to offset lower revenue from the traditional game market. NPD defines the traditional market as packaged goods sold at retail. In the third quarter, that totaled $1.3 billion.

“New physical retail sales had a rough third quarter,” said Anita Frazier, an analyst with NPD. “Increases in sales from some of these other monetization methods, and full game and add-on digital downloads in particular, only partially offset the decline see in the new physical retail channel.”

She said the overall market, including hardware, totaled $4.2 billion, down 11 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

For companies like Electronic Arts, which is investing heavily in mobile and social games and is placing big bets on online content, like today’s release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the results of these monthly and quarterly reports are unrepresentative of the trends they are seeing.

“Everything is growing. If you look at the total interactive business, it’s a $50 billion market internationally, and that’s up double digits. That’s where we play,” said EA’s President of Labels Frank Gibeau. “We find it frustrating because it doesn’t tell the whole picture.”

In the second quarter, EA’s digital revenue, which includes downloadable console content, mobile and social — was up 30 percent year over year.

Even a company like Activision, which has been slower to develop games on Facebook and mobile, said that during the second quarter, revenue from digital channels — mostly downloadable content — increased 27 percent year ove year, and accounted for 37 percent of the company’s total net revenue.

For all-digital companies, like Zynga, which went public last week to raise $1 billion, its impact hardly seems to register.

“I think that ultimately we are an interactive entertainment company, not a packaged goods company,” Gibeau said. “We are platform and channel agnostic. The physical channel is a great channel and it’s going to be around longer than people think. … We are fine with that model, but then, when you bring that game home, you should be able to connect to the larger online world.”

“This November marks the best November on record for sales of new physical content,” said NPD Group’s Anita Frazier.

Activision said within the first five days of sales, Call of Duty shattered all previous entertainment records, grossing more than $775 million. In fact, its first month of sales beat the game’s predecessor by about 7 percent, NPD added.

In NPD’s report released today, it analyzed videogame sales for November, taking into account sales made at retail across both hardware and software. It excludes the sale of digital content, like mobile games and downloadable content.

In November, NPD said software sales totaled $1.7 billion, jumping 15 percent from $1.45 billion in the same month last year. Hardware sales weren’t so lucky, falling 9 percent to $982 million from $1.1 billion in November 2010.

The second-most popular title during the month was Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Xbox, PlayStation and the PC. “In one month, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is just about half a million units shy of matching Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in lifetime sales. Its first month performance was a five-fold increase over Oblivion’s first month sales,” Frazier said.

The rest of the titles in the top 10 are:

• Battlefield 3, Electronic Arts
• Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Ubisoft
• Just Dance, Ubisoft
• Madden NFL 12, Electronic Arts
• Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Sony
• Saints Row: The Third, THQ
• The Legend of Zelda: SkywardSword, Nintendo
• Batman: Arkham City, Warner Bros. Interactive

And things are actually worse than that. Topping the list compiled by NPD was Hewlett-Packard, which only sold that many tablets thanks to a billion dollar fire sale.

HP accounted for 17 percent of those tablets, just ahead of Samsung, which had 16 percent of the market, followed by Asus, Motorola and Acer, which each had around a 9 or 10 percent share.

Of course, that means things were even more dismal for the other companies vying for tablet share, a list that includes HTC, Toshiba, Research In Motion and Dell, to name just a few.

NPD analyst Stephen Baker sees the very small glass as half full.

“If you look at the tablet market without Apple there are a number of high-profile brands vying for that number two spot,” Baker said in a statement, adding that three quarters of those who bought a tablet were not even considering an iPad, which he said is “an indication that a large group of consumers are looking for alternatives, and an opportunity for the rest of the market to grow their business.”

And of course, things are getting more interesting thanks to Amazon and its Kindle Fire.

But Baker also notes that the market is awfully crowded and there is not much left to go around.

That’s a 20 percent increase over the first half of the year. And, as you can see from the chart below, the spike in sales occurred with the July launch of the new hardware and has been trending upward ever since. So in four months the Air has gone from less than 10 percent of Apple’s notebook business to nearly a third of it. How much will it comprise by 2012?

Close to 50 percent? That might seem like a stretch, though some analysts have been forecasting it for a while. Back in July, Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore predicted that sales of the Air could ramp to as high as 1.5 million per quarter, which is indeed about half of Apple’s MacBook business. Obviously, they’ve still got a way to go. But we haven’t yet hit the holiday consumer binge. And 2012 could bring with it a new 15-inch Air, destined to drive sales of the machine higher still …

The machine is on a real growth tear. New metrics from research outfit NPD show Mac sales up 19 percent year over year in October.

That upward trend bodes well for the company as it heads into the holiday shopping season. Indeed, extrapolating from those numbers, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster figures Apple will sell between 5.1 million and 5.3 million Macs during the December quarter, accounting for about 18 percent of overall revenue for the period.

That’s year-over-year growth of between 23 percent and 28 percent. Impressive. More so, considering the state of the PC market, which these days is suffering from slowing sales growth.

In all, physical sales of both hardware and software totaled $1.08 billion, up from $1.07 billion year over year, according to NPD Group’s monthly U.S. game industry report.

The biggest console performer was the Xbox for the ninth month in a row. It sold 393,000 units, up 21 percent compared to October 2010 — resulting in a 44 percent industry share.

David Dennis, Group Product Manager of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, told AllThingsD that sales were driven by blockbuster games that started to launch in September and grew in October.

During the month, six of the top 10 console games were available on the Xbox, including Battlefield 3, Batman, NBA 2K12, Rage, and exclusives including Forza Motorsport 4 and Gears of War 3.

The other hardware platform that performed surprisingly well was Nintendo’s portable 3DS, which clearly has benefited from a steep price drop. After a poor reception in July, Nintendo slashed the price of the 3DS to $169.99 from $249.99.

The 3DS was the second-best-selling hardware platform, and when combined with the older DS model sales, Nintendo sold 25 percent more compared to last October.

In all, it sold 1.65 million units, Nintendo said, to put it on track to surpass the first-year total of the Nintendo DS, which sold 2.37 million in its first 12 months on market.

Nintendo’s home console system, the Wii, didn’t do as well. It sold 250,000 units.

Not so: The latest data from research houses Gartner and IDC shows that HP, already the biggest PC maker in the world, managed to grow its share of the market in the most recent quarter, and actually grew faster than the rest of the industry as a whole.

According to Gartner, HP’s share edged up to 17.7 percent in the third quarter from 17.4 percent in the year-ago period, and it sold 16.2 million PCs. By IDC’s reckoning, (Gartner and IDC conduct their counts a little differently) HP commanded an 18.1 percent share of the market, up from 17.8 percent a year ago, and shipped 16.6 million PCs.

The data, along with retail PC sales as tracked by the research firm NPD, is widely watched in the PC industry and, if nothing else, gives some indication as to the reasoning behind the trial balloon story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, which said that HP is rethinking its spinoff plans.

Meanwhile, Dell saw its share fall on both lists, and its position fell to third place behind China’s Lenovo, with Acer coming in fourth on a global basis. Apple maintained its third-place position in the U.S. market and grew its share to nearly 13 percent in the Gartner rankings and north of 11 percent on the IDC list.

For HP, a world-dominating market share is certainly nice to have, but meaningless if it’s not profitable — which it is. In fact, despite declining revenues — sales in HP’s personal systems group fell by about $1 billion in the first nine months of fiscal 2011, to $29.5 billion — the company managed to boost its operating margins from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 6 percent so far this year.

We know most of the reasons for the decline. Apple’s iPad has tamped down demand for conventional notebooks, and HP, having sought to create a competitive response with its TouchPad, didn’t have much luck. The impact is especially pronounced in HP’s notebook sales, which is where most of the billion-dollar drop in sales in the PC division were seen during the first nine months of the year. The results were offset, oddly enough, by a $366 million increase in sales of high-end professional workstation computers.

Still, having a big PC business gives a company like HP the leverage it needs to buy parts from suppliers for its more profitable businesses. In HP’s enterprise storage and networking group, operating margins were about 14 percent in the first nine months of the fiscal year, where sales grew by more than $2 billion.

It is easier to negotiate favorable prices from chip and memory suppliers like Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Micron — and hard drive suppliers like Seagate and Western Digital — when you’re still the world’s biggest consumer of their products. Absent the PC division, HP’s orders from those suppliers would be smaller and incrementally more expensive, as discounts are often negotiated based on the volume of components ordered.

The enterprise business was to be HP’s future under former CEO Léo Apotheker, and there is little question that its emphasis won’t continue to be on the enterprise going forward. But as HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman, chairman Ray Lane and the rest of HP’s management team contemplate the decision to spin off PCs or not, the evidence is mounting that the two faces of HP are inextricably linked.

According to the latest metrics from NPD, domestic Mac sales for the first month of the September quarter were up 26 percent year over year, buoyed by new hardware and an eagerly anticipated update to Apple’s OS X. That’s more than six times the growth of the broader PC market.

And if it continues, Apple will likely meet consensus estimates of 4.5 million total Mac sales for the current quarter, said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. “We believe Mac sales benefited from the 7/20 launch of OS X Lion along with refreshed MacBook Airs and Mac minis,” Munster explained in a note to clients. “But these tailwinds will fade throughout the September quarter and year-over-year compares get slightly tougher in the last two months of the quarter.”

The softening PC market seems to have had little to no effect on Mac sales. Nor is it likely to in the future, given current growth trends. As I’ve noted here before, Mac sales have outpaced the broader PC market for 21 consecutive quarters now. And there’s little to suggest that streak is coming to an end any time soon.

Said Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes, “We believe Apple will continue to gain share in Macs over the long term even as the iPad grows. Given the data and our checks, our estimate for Mac growth of 18 percent year-over-year for Apple’s C3Q, may turn out to be conservative even though the global economy appears to be slowing quite a bit.”

The research house says the Mac saw a year-over-year sales increase in April 2011 of 9 percent. That’s nowhere near the 22 percent Y-O-Y growth Wall Street is looking for in the entire June quarter.

Why the descrepancy? Simple. April of 2010 is a hell of a tough comparison month.

The refresh of the MacBook Pro line on April 13 drove a 39 percent spike in Mac sales for the month. With no similar refreshes juicing demand in April of 2011, sales aren’t up quite as much.

Which doesn’t mean Apple won’t post that 22 percent increase investors are hoping for. As Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster notes, it’s far too early to make a call on the June quarter, particularly given the launch of new iMacs earlier this month.

In fact, according to NPD weekly data, Apple saw Y-O-Y unit growth in Macs of 35 percent during the first week of May following the May 3 launch of the new quad-core, Thunderbolt iMacs.

According to NPD, Apple leapfrogged both HTC and Motorola to move into the No. 3 spot with 14 percent of the overall phone market, boosted by the arrival of the iPhone on Verizon. Samsung still tops the U.S. market with 23 percent, followed by LG at 18 percent.

“Apple and Verizon had a very successful launch of the iPhone 4, which allowed the iPhone to expand its market share that was previously held back by its prolonged carrier exclusivity with AT&T,” said Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis at NPD, in a statement. “While some of that growth came at the expense of Android operating system, Android models still accounted for half of all smartphones sold in the quarter.”

However, Android’s share of the smartphone market dipped in the quarter, NPD said, to 50 percent in the first quarter from 53 percent in last year’s fourth quarter. Apple’s iOS rose nine percentage points, accounting for 28 percent of smartphone units sold, while BlackBerry lost five points of market share, falling to 14 percent.

For the first time, smartphones overall accounted for more than half of all phones sold in the U.S., with consumers opting for a smartphone 54 percent of the time. That lead to a 2 percent rise in the average selling price of phones, to $102. The trend of more smartphones at lower average prices should continue, Rubin said.

“We’ve started to increasingly see lower-priced handsets come in, both at the major carriers and at some of the regional carriers as well,” Rubin said in a telephone interview. Rubin noted that consumers are starting to move to Android at carriers that cater to the more price-sensitive segments of the market, including carriers such as Cricket, Sprint’s Boost Mobile brand and Metro PCS.

“Despite the higher fees, consumers are adopting those handsets, as they are important to stay in touch with the rest of the world,” Rubin said.

The iPhone 4 was the top individual phone model, followed by the iPhone 3GS, Motorola Droid X, HTC EVO 4G, and HTC Droid Incredible. Overall for the quarter, smartphone sales grew 8 percent from the fourth quarter, but total phone sells fell 1 percent.

In March, Microsoft said it had sold 10 million Kinect sensors in the first four months. But it was evident that sales could be slowing after a huge spike during the holidays.

The two accessories are slightly different but serve the same purpose of extending the life of the videogame console by widening the audience it serves from the hardcore segment to the more casual player.

The Xbox Kinect uses a camera to track the movements of players, so they don’t need to use a controller at all. Generally, the best use case for it so far are games that mimic dancing, but recently, Xbox has started integrating the technology into other services, such as Netflix.

In contrast, the PlayStation Move, which uses a camera and a controller, is more similar to the Nintendo Wii.

Because the player must hold a controller, Sony claims, actions can be much more precise, making the system appropriate for a wider selection of games. There are also peripherals for the controller, such as the Sharp Shooter, which allows a user to simulate shooting a gun. Sony said despite limited supply, 40 percent of the time the Sharp Shooter accessory sold alongside Killzone 3 at key retailers.

During the holidays, Microsoft had a difficult time meeting demand for the Kinect, but supply has since caught up. Today, Sony also reported shortages of the Move.

In a statement, Bob McKenzie, SVP of merchandising for GameStop, said: “Due to the demand for the PlayStation Move motion controller, we’ve been struggling to keep units in stock in our U.S. GameStop stores. With big franchise titles set for release throughout the year for the PlayStation Move, we expect the remainder of 2011 to be a period of continued sales growth for PlayStation Move.”

Sony also said the PS3 has now sold 50 million units worldwide and has more than 75 million registered accounts for the PlayStation Network, which offers downloadable games and entertainment.