Computer Giant Dell To produce New Netbook

May 29th, 2008 Posted in News

What is a Netbook or a ‘cut-down’ laptop I hear you say! A new venture for Dell is what it is and available to general consumers it soon will be! These have been designed for the developing world to promote low-cost computing and companies such as Dell are joining the ranks of offering these cut-down laptops. However, Dell has not yet revealed information about the netbook in terms of the pricing or the specifications.

Michael Dell presented the laptop to the editor of the Gizmodo website, during the ‘All Things Digital Conference’. As quoted by Michael Dell he has “positioned it as the perfect device for the next billion internet users”, with the netbook market being driven by the One Laptop Per Child programme. This is also being pushed by Asus Eee PC, the availability of chips made by Intel and Via which have been designed to cut down costs and reduce power consumption.

Other companies, which have entered the market, include Hewlett-Packard (using Via processors) and Acer. It is estimated that over 3.6 million netbooks is expected to be sold this year and will cost under $500. One thing to point out on the subject of optimistic estimations made on the sales, is that this is a fast growing market. “I’ve not seen energy like this from our customers in a long, long time” says Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini.

Currently Intel are pushing for Mobile Internet Devices (MID) which are even smaller computing machines and is going to be powered by Linux rather than Microsoft due to the level of power consumption. Mr Otellini further adds, “Vista has a larger memory footprint, a larger graphics requirement and a higher price point. This is all about low-cost computing”.

However, in a recent turnaround to prevent Linux from snatching every piece of this market, Eee PC is now extending its support to using XP OS on the sub-notebooks. This includes cutting down the cost for a license to run XP on the netbook to just £14 in developing countries.

As if, this market was not competitive enough! Via have recently announced a newly designed hardware for low cost laptops, which is aptly named the OpenBook. Via are hoping the design will influence manufacturer to build netbooks using Via Chips. The One Laptop Per Child has also revealed a sneak preview design the XO2 – the netbook tipped to be a newer version.