The shipment of smartphones and tablet computers with Google's Android operating system will break the 1 billion barrier in 2014, Gartner said.
Andriod is installed on products made by Samsung, HTC, Sony and many other makers and it's expected to reach 1.1 billion users this year, up 26 percent on last year.
The number of Apple 's IOS and Mac OS systems is expected to be 344 million, up 28% on last year. Microsoft's Windows operating system, which dominates the PC and notebook segments, is forecast to be in 360 million new devices, up from 328 million in 2013.
The popularity of tablet computers has hit the sales of PC and notebook segment. The sales of tablet computers will be xexpected to increase 47% to 263 million.
"Consumers continue to move away from the trational PC as it becomes more of a shared-content creation tool, while the greater flexibility of tablets, hybrids and lighter notebooks address uese's increasing different usage demands." Gartner said.
It expects combined global shipments of all devices to reach 2.48 billion units this year, up 7.6 per cent on 2013.
written by Nicolas Yang
