Asus may have created the market for netbooks and for the longest time it sat pretty at the top of the sales charts. However, for the third quarter of 2008, the firm was unable to secure its place as the largest vendor of netbooks and instead was relegated to second spot by arch-rival Acer. This according to DisplaySearch, which measured a 38.3 percent market share for the Acer One followed by Asus’ Eee line with 30.3 percent, accounting for 2.15 and 1.7 million units moved respectively.


Third-place goes for HP, which leads the overall notebook market, with its VIA-based Mini-Note 2133 selling 330,000 units and capturing 5.8 percent share of the market. Rounding out the top five are MSI and Dell with 5.7 and 2.8 percent share each. Check out DisplaySearch’s complete report here.