And the most popular netbook in Q3 was... the Acer Aspire One, closely followed by - surprise, surprise - the combined collection of Asus Eee PCs.

So says market watcher DisplaySearch, which measured a 38.3 per cent market share for Acer, a good way ahead of Asus' 30.3 per cent.

That's good news for Acer, not simply because it was ahead of the company that effectively started the netbook market, but that it did so with one machine. DisplaySearch counted 1.70m Eee PCs and 2.15m AA1s that shipped in Q3. But while there are a handful of AA1 SKUs, there are dozens and dozens of Eee PC variants.

HP took the third place - perhaps surprisingly, given the generally so-so reception its VIA-based Mini-Note 2133 netbook got - with 330,00-odd units and a 5.8 per cent market share. That was just ahead of MSI, which shipped 320,000 Wind netbooks for a 5.7 per cent share of the market.

Mind you, we see Medion's in the chart, in joint sixth place. Medion's netbook is a re-branded MSI Wind, and adding its contribution to MSI's own, lifts the Wind to 450,000 units and an eight per cent market share.

Either way, Dell shopped 160,000 Mini 9 netbooks, to give it a 2.8 per cent market share. Not bad, that, since it didn't ship its machine until the very end of the quarter.

The OLPC XO has been around longer, but it only racked up shipments totaling 130,000 units, giving it a 2.3 per cent share.

Rounding off the top ten, Intel's Classmate PC partners together shipped 60,000 machines for a combined share of one per cent - figures matched by Japan's Kohjinhsha. Lenovo shipped 40,000 IdeaPad S9s and S10s, yielding a share of 0.7 per cent, just ahead of Toshiba's 0.5 per cent share, built on the back of 30,000 units shipped.

Overall, some 5.61m netbooks shipped globally in Q3 - 160 per cent more than the number that shipped in Q2, DisplaySearch said and forecast some 14m netbooks will ship in 2008, up from a mere million last year.

"We expect the mini-note PC market to settle at approximately 16 per cent share of the notebook PC market by 2011," DisplaySearch's notebook research chief, John Jacobs, said.

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