Tablets will grow rapidly enough over the next five years to be nearly as important as notebooks, the NPD Group's DisplaySearch wing said in an unusually long-term estimate. Determining that tablets will have grown 256 percent this year where notebooks would be up just 12 percent, it predicted a quick enough pace that there would be 383.3 million tablets shipped in 2017. While notebooks would be up to 432 million in this view, they would no longer have the clear advantage.
