ConsumerIT - For Europe's High Volume PC Retailers, Distributors & Builders

Combined Lenovo smartphone and tablet sales beat PCs for the first time in Q2 2013-- the company says smartphone sales reach 11.4 million units and tablets total 1.5m.

When it comes to PCs Lenovo sees growth in laptops, with sales reaching $4.5 billion with 4.7% Y-o-Y growth, while Q2 2013 desktop sales drop by -2.8% on a Y-o-Y basis.

According to Gartner Lenovo is the only top 5 vendor seeing growth in the W. European Q2 2013 PC market-- 18.9% Y-o-Y to be precise, far ahead from the struggling likes of HP, Acer and Dell. The company comes 3rd in the vendor rankings with 11.5% share (up from 7.8% in Q2 2012).

“While driving profitable growth in our core PC business, we are rapidly transforming our company into a PC Plus company." CEO Yang yuanqing says. "The PC Plus market requires fast, efficient innovation as it moves quickly from premium products to mainstream ones and from mature market domination to emerging market hyper growth."

It looks like CEO Hubert Joly's "Renew Blue" turnaround plan is bearing Best Buy some fruit-- Q2 2013 sales drop by -0.4% Y-o-Y to $9.3 billion, an improvement over the -1.6% decline the retailer saw a year earlier.

Sales from Best Buy stores open for at least 14 months are down by -0.6% Y-o-Y, a decline the retailer blames on "short-term disruptions" caused by Samsung and Windows boutique store-within-store rollouts.

Earnings total $266 million, mostly thanks to $226m worth in legal settlements, as well as gains from the Best Buy Europe sale.

Asus launches the first motherboard bearing Thunderbolt 2 certification-- the Z87-Deluxe/Quad ATX, a Z87-based number ready for 4th generation Intel Core processors.

It has pair Thunderbolt 2 ports allowing the simultaneous connection of 12 devices with a 20Gbit/s transfer rate.

“Z87-Deluxe/Quad has been subjected to tremendous compatibility, BIOS validation, video/audio and other tests to verify its quality and design," a company statement claims. "Being the world’s first certified motherboard for Thunderbolt 2 technology also means setting the standard for all of the upcoming products, which is something that Asus has always done.”

In a bid to protect the HDD industry from the flash-based storage Western Digital, HGST, Seagate and Toshiba join forces in the Storage Products Association (SPA).

"HDDs are a crucial technology for storing the ever expanding data that humans and our machines are generating," Coughlin Associates says. "HDDs combined with flash memory can provide users the speed they need while providing affordable mass storage. With continued development of advanced storage technology and storage architectures these amazing storage devices will provide a home for the world's accessible data and serve every type of content users for many years to come."