Smartphones, Tablets, Tab-Phones Edging PCs Off The Shelf?

You know when you’re out and see some guy stick something the size of a paperback novel to his ear and actually talk into it? It’s not the 1990s. He’s got e-mail, weather, stocks and Angry Birds on the same appliance.

Meet Mr. 2013. Shipments of smartphones and tablet PCs are both on the rise, with the first up 40 percent and the second nearly 100 percent this year, market research firm TrendForce forecasts. But because most phones run too small for easy keyboard input and tablets too big for taking calls, developers are working on the paperback-sized hybrids so you can do both.

These devices are probably contracted, if not also invented, inTaiwan

, where about an eighth of the economy is high-tech exports. Taiwan also happens to host one of the world’s major consumer electronics shows, and I’d aim my angry bird at Computex 2013 in June to show that phones are reaching albatross levels while tablets are singing with the warblers. PCs are squawking to hold their roost.

Personal computers, including notebooks and desktops, lost market share in 2012 and are expected to lose more in 2013. Shipments lost 5.9 percent last year and will drop another 5.2 percent this year with 303.2 million units, Taipei-based TrendForce says. Its market research peer Gartner says PC shipments lost 3 percent last year and will shed another 4 this year.

New users are going for tablets and smartphones instead of PCs, says Tracy Tsai, principal research with Gartner in Taipei. Replacements of notebooks have slowed as users turn to smaller, trendier, more mobile alternatives. Imagine answering the phone with your HP Envy laptop or stuffing an AcerAspire into a shirt pocket.

“It’s not that you would use a smartphone to replace a PC, but you would use the PC less, so the upgrade rate is going down,” Tsai says.

Windows 8, Microsoft’s first serious effort at an operating system for mobile devices, has put another layer of dust on keyboard-operated PCs. You can use Windows 8 with a keyboard, but the interface stares back at you and says dude, wouldn’t it be nice to just touch the screen and watch all these icons glide by?

Sure, and especially on the way to work. Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones (Aurora, Note 3) have grown to six inches tall. Apple’s iPads have shrunken to less than eight inches, and they’re not the smallest tablets out there. In Taiwan, Asustek Computer has issued three models of PadFone, and the product name speaks for itself.

“Anything larger than six inches is not easy for a single user to carry in hand or put in a wallet or a purse,” notes Sean Yang, an assistant vice president at TrendForce.

But PCs won’t fall out of the nest. Expect more of them, from the slender ultrabooks that ramped up in 2011 to extra-wide notebooks for hardcore gamers. Smart developers will diversify into mobile devices so they don’t rely on PCs but at the same time not put too many eggs into the mobile device basket, Tsai predicts.

Says Asustek Computer spokesman David Chang: “We are seeing an increasing popularity for the PadFone series and it is NOT designed to replace conventional notebooks.” Chang’s quote came to this blog by e-mail, with the word “not” already in caps.