Samsung rode the coattails of the netbook trend to pass not only Sony but Apple in notebook sales early this year, iSuppli found today. Its portable shipments shot up 14.9 percent in the first three months of the year to top 1.9 million, or just enough to pass Apple's 1.8 million MacBooks for seventh place and to clearly overtake Sony. The year-over-year growth easily soared past the industry, as Samsung nearly doubled its shipments from just 985,000 PCs in early 2009.
