This post was published 1 year 20 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.

In these days of dire economic fears and direr (is that a real word? If not it should be) predictions, there is one tech segment in which sunny, unbridled optimism is still the Sparkleberry Kool-Aid of the day – Netbooks.

According to industry reports, Acer is on target to make it’s lofty goal of selling 7 (million…thanks Pedah) of their Acer Aspire One Netbook in 2008, despite it only hitting shelves in the middle of the year. What’s more, it has gone ahead and placed it’s 2009 Aspire One orders with turnkey manufacturers Compal Electronics and Wistron…calling for the companies to produce a whopping 15 million of the Netbooks in the calendar year. This will still leave another 5 million units left over (possibly to be produced by Quanta despite bad blood with Acer) as Acer is quite confident it will sell TWENTY MILLION of the devices in 2009. Whether this prediction is despite or because of the ongoing financial turmoil is hard to guess.

Acer does seem to be in the driver’s seat as of late regarding Netbooks, as they have found a way to sell units running Atom processors with large drives at a very low pricepoint. Add to this a lot of favorable reviews for the Aspire One’s keyboard, continued brand recognition problems for the MSi Wind (which they compound by OEMing the device to every two-bit company with a rebranding channel and a little dream of selling a Netbook all their own) and the fact that Dell has failed to sustain the initial hype over the Dell E and it seems that the Aspire One may be the Netbook leader coming into the holiday season.

(Source – Digitimes)

Zealot (445 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).