Buy two tablets, stop a laptop from being shipped

Consumers are keen on tablets, but big business is positively bonkers for them, if market watcher Canalys is to be believed.

It reckons corporates will buy 1.12m iPads and other such gadgets this year, up from 20,410 they acquired in 2010.

That's a growth rate of over 5397 per cent, Canalys said today.

Tablet sales to ordinary punters will rise this year by a more modest 200 per cent, the research firm said. Some 52m slabs will ship in total, 39m of them from Apple.

So that's it for the netbook, then. Not quite, no. Sales to consumers will fall 14.2 per cent this year, Canalys forecast, but that still means 2011 global shipments of almost 32.48m, down from 37.93m in 2010.

Corporates, on the other hand, will buy 28.1 per cent more netbooks this year than last, adding 1.86m units to the total.

Notebooks shipments to enterprise will rise 11.2 per cent, Canalys predicted, to 96.36m machines. Consumer shipments will hit 113.84m notebooks, up 5.2 per cent year on year.

Both notebook and netbook shipments would have been higher but for the fondleslab fad.

For every ten tablets sold this year, Canalys said, it estimates that five netbook or notebook sales will be lost, across both consumer and enterprise markets. ®