Acer has been boasting for a while that it plans to dominate the PC market thanks to aggressive pricing and good products. The company has some of the nicer netbooks and notebooks on the market already, however, the PC market is traditionally topped by American firms like Dell and HP.

The latest results for the PC industry for Q2 2010 are in from Gartner and Acer has booted Dell from the second place spot for global PC shipments and is surprisingly close to HP, which still holds the top spot.

HP owns 17.4% of the global computer market and posted growth of 12.3% compared to Q2 2009. Acer owns the second sport with 13% of the global market with growth of 31.6% compared to Q2 2009. Dell is now in the third sport with 12.4% of the global market and 19% growth compared to last year. The biggest mover on the chart compared to last year is Lenovo with 47.2% growth from Q2 2009 to Q2 2010. Lenovo holds 10% of the global PC market. ASUS and Toshiba round out the top six global PC vendors with 5.2% and 5.1% of the market respectively.

"The preliminary second quarter results indicate ongoing improvement of the PC market, and it marks the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth on a year-over-year basis," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "End-user spending grew approximately 13 percent in the second quarter. Average selling prices (ASPs) continue to decline, but at a much slower rate compared with the last two years."

The numbers for the quarter show that the netbooks or “mini-notebooks” as Gartner calls them are now entering the mature stage. Netbook shipments reportedly grew in the low 20% range, down significantly from the 70% and higher growth posted in Q4 2009 and Q2 2010.

"Mini-notebook shipment growth slowed significantly in the second quarter of 2010," Ms. Kitagawa said. "Mini-notebook shipment growth still exceeded growth rates of the overall mobile PC market, but mini-notebook growth slowed to the low 20 percent range compared with more than 70 percent in the last two quarters. This slowdown indicates that mini-notebooks are entering a mature growth stage."

HP still dominates shipments in the U.S. market with 25.7% share, Dell is second with 23.7%, Acer is third with 11.3%, and Apple is fourth with 9.8% of the U.S. market. Acer actually lost ground by a slight 0.1% compared to Q2 2009 in the U.S. market while Toshiba grew the most with 39.7% growth compared to 2009. Apple also grew significantly during Q2 in the U.S. with 24.7% growth compared to Q2 2009.