14 DAY TRIAL // Immediately after Asus made a point in the low-budget sector with their Eee notebook, Acer has begun taking things seriously. According to the president of Acer Taiwanese division, Scott Lin, the company has formed a group of experts to sketch a project aiming at the low-end sector. The facts stop here for the moment, sustains Lin, as the company hasn't elaborated a research and development budget yet, since the company's main goal remains the typical notebook production.
Lin believes that the actual market for low-performance, low-cost computers can not exactly be defined, and therefore, the company is still munching upon whether to launch such a product line or not. There is no sense in designing a product without previously knowing your potential clients' needs, financial possibilities and product expectations, he continued.
Moreover, Acer expects the global notebook shipments to vary around 120 million units roughly in the next year, while Asustek's Eee PC will be accounting for a maximum of 3 percent of the overall market.
Scott Lin also confessed that, while the company have been inspecting two of the competition's Eee PCs, they couldn't help noticing that the small-size notebooks suffer of major drawbacks and lack some essential features. On top of that, Linux is not very popular among the desktop users. Summing all up, Acer considers that the best policy is to keep away from the low budget market, at least for now, states the president.
While giving the company the right to reasonably question the necessity of a low-end product series, the issue of Linux being very popular is out of context, since Acer has decided to ship pre-loaded Ubuntu distributions no later than mid-July this year on their Intel Duel Core Aspire 5710z machines. Fact is that we won't be hearing or seeing a cheap product from Acer any sooner.