THE PC is dead - doomsayers have been saying this for the past decade.

That hunk of metal sitting humbly below your desk will be replaced by nimbler and ever-smarter handhelds, they predict.

The reality, however, is a little different.

Experts say the PC has continued to sell more every year in the past three decades, and this year is no different.

In 2008, worldwide sales will go up by 11 per cent to 293 million units, fuelled in part by emerging markets that still have low PC penetration, according to research firm Gartner.

Revenues, too, will rise. Though this will be at a modest 6 per cent, it is testament to the enduring appeal of a machine that was once meant for churning out boring spreadsheets and reports.

Today, it is also a game machine, a picture viewer and music jukebox all rolled into one.

It's true the PC may not have made it big in the living room, as many enthusiasts expected a few years ago.

It is still a little noisier and less visually pleasing than most of the audio-visual components on the TV rack.

The game console, essentially a specialised entertainment PC with better looks, may fit better next to an LCD TV screen.

Still, the PC has found itself a niche in some uses and gained ground in new areas.

For example, gamers who desire high resolution and detail in their games still swear by the PC as the ultimate gaming machine.

And compared to those beige boxes of old, PCs now are also better designed to fit users' needs.

Asus' Nova desktop PC, for example, is no bigger than a couple of cans of soft drinks and will fit nicely in a small room.

And in UMPCs (ultra-mobile PCs), manufacturers have come up with a new class of devices that users have never had.

UMPCs like the HP Compaq 2133 are designed to be slim and light, yet with keyboards large enough for people to type reports comfortably.

Far from buying fewer PCs, people may actually be having more than one.

About eight years ago, PCs were very much a device shared by everyone at home.

These days, you may have a laptop for work, a desktop PC at home to play games on and, if you are truly geeky, even a third PC to manage the multimedia files that everyone at home stores and retrieves for playback.

Thanks to the many uses, the PC - and, indeed, the peripherals industry that supplies the memory modules and printers - is very much alive.

Though cellphone maker Nokia may say that the mobile gizmo is what PCs have become, one is not a substitute for the other.

Yes, you can play Quake, that old PC first-person shooter game, on portable devices.

But few people will relish spending three hours peering at the tiny screen, and that is just one reason why the PC lives on.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life on 15 April 2008.