PC shipments in Western Europe declined by 20.5 percent during the first quarter: The only vendors to see shipments grow were Lenovo and Apple, which returned to the top five.

Apple retook its spot as China's fifth largest smartphone vendor in the first quarter, as the country's market grew to triple the size of the U.S.'s.

Any deal by IBM to sell parts of its server business to Lenovo is likely to focus on low-end commodity x86 hardware, not higher-end x86 systems such as IBM's PureSystems and iDataPlex servers, an industry analyst said Thursday.

IBM is in "advanced discussions" with Lenovo over a possible deal for it to purchase IBM's x86 server business, according to two news reports.

Cloud hosting provider Rackspace Hosting is striking back against patent holder Rotatable Technologies, a Texas company that has filed patent infringement cases against more than a dozen companies in the past year.

IBM's reported interest in selling parts of its x86 server business to Lenovo may bring major changes to the global market.

Asia is fast becoming the epicenter of the PC market as Chinese and Taiwanese companies challenge the turf occupied for more than a decade by prominent U.S. PC makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell, whose laptop and desktop shipments are stumbling.

Tablets are the hot tech product of 2011, but most seem to offer very little differentiation in screen size, specifications and software. Lenovo is at least attempting something new with its ThinkPad Tablet: it's aimed squarely at business users and comes with a digitiser pen for drawing.

Lenovo's IdeaCentre All-in-One desktops have been revamped for 2011, offering up a host of new features, and functionality. There's something for everyone here, with 3D displays, multitouch, TV tuners and new processors from AMD and Intel.