In a bit of news being discussed far and wide across the Internet, it seems as if Apple has been named the world’s leading vendor of mobile PCs.

The data, which combined both notebook and tablet sales, was drawn up for the last quarter of 2010.

According to the report, Apple dominated the market with 17.2 percent of the share, which equated to 10.2 million tablet and notebook sales. HP, which came in second, wound up selling 9.3 million units for 15.6 percent of the market share.

Richard Shim, senior analyst at DisplaySearch, said, “Apple is currently benefiting from significant and comprehensive growth from both sectors of the mobile PC spectrum, notebooks and tablet PCs. Cannibalization seems limited at this point."

“In total, worldwide mobile PC shipments reached 59.6 million, up 8 percent from the prior quarter and 17 percent from the same period a year ago. But excluding tablets, notebook sales were up just 1 percent from a year ago and 4 percent sequentially.”

These figures represent a substantial trend towards mobility that has only been hinted at in the past. And Apple’s statistics are especially important for this market, since they were one of the first companies out of the gate with a fully functional tablet PC.

And the trend isn’t going anywhere. Shim added, "While we anticipate increased competition in the tablet PC market later this year with the introduction of Android Honeycomb-based tablets, Apple's iPad business is complementing a notebook line whose shipments widely exceed the industry average growth rate."

The increasing rate of mobile tablet PC sales has been on several analysts’ radar, and it seems that mobile devices are nearly 20 percent more common this year than they were 365 days ago.

Of allover mobile PC sales, tablets hold the lion’s share. In fact, in that particular segment alone, Apple holds 70 percent of 2011’s tablet sales. That’s as per Barclay analyst Ben Reitzes, who recently explored the reasons why other tablet PC manufacturers are still struggling to catch up.

Among the reasons listed were marketing power, timing, and app inventory. Apple has a legendary marketing team; was the first company to offer a real, fully-functional tablet PC; and lastly, had a huge, already existent app inventory to draw on thanks to the popularity of its similarly OSed iPhone devices.

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