Netbook sales down 34% year over year. Can we call them dead, yet?

Less-useful than a laptop, less-awesome than a tablet, the netbook market has suffered the most in the past two years with the rise of the iPad (and other tablets, of course, but really let’s just blame Apple). Keyboards were the last real argument for the netbook over a tablet and most tablets have keyboard attachments that work just fine.

With a 34% drop in Q1 2012 versus Q1 2011 marking the 6th consecutive drop for the waning product, can we call them dead, yet?

In a press release by Canalys that was punctuated by the announcement that HP regained the top spot in PC sales over Apple by 40,000 units thanks to sluggish iPad sales, the point of note is that the netbook continues to fall from relevance.

‘Most of the leading PC vendors have done a reasonable job of offsetting the declines in their netbook shipments over the past year with increased pad business,’ said Canalys Research Analyst Tom Evans. ‘Samsung and Lenovo are two that stand out in terms of substantially increasing overall volume, though Asus has performed well too. The challenge is breaking out into the really big volumes to challenge the leaders – Apple and Amazon. So far, only Samsung has shown it can routinely ship more than a million pads a quarter.’

After Apple, Lenovo, Acer, and Dell rounded out the top 5.