Another Eee PC competitor in the pipeline

Jul 30, 2008 10:26 GMT  ·  By

Do you want to know just how promising the netbook market really is? The answer to that is simple: just enough to make Lenovo want a share of the pie with one of its own products. Apparently, the Chinese computer manufacturer is highly interested in the emerging market - so much so that it is already considering the possible release of product to compete with ASUS' vast Eee PC family and with all the other available netbooks.

Currently, no details about the upcoming product are available, the only official announcement so far being that in which Ken Wong, general manager of Lenovo Taiwan, confirmed that the company was considering launching a netbook. According to him, Lenovo's version of a netbook will take in consideration both the consumer and the enterprise markets, although whether he was talking about a single device for both segments or not is still uncertain.

The news about Lenovo's venture on the market of the small-sized, low-power and low-cost portable computer systems just goes to prove that it is now considered one of the most important markets for portable computers. According to Digitimes, Compal Electronics, Wistron and Pegatron Technology are all possible candidates for the manufacturing of the Lenovo netbook. Compal is, in fact, one of the company's most significant partners, having achieved the impressive feat of shipping 1.1 million mainstream notebooks in this year's second quarter.

As noted above, no detailed information is currently available on the rumored upcoming product. It's highly probable that this will also be an Atom-powered netbook, which, if true, will set it as a direct competitor to ASUS' Eee PC, MSI's Wind and Acer's Aspire One, these being the most successful netbooks available on the market at this point in time.

On the other hand, Lenovo could also design its product as part of the "premium" lot, where it could compete with one of Toshiba's solutions. All these speculations aside, we still have to wait until late September to see what Lenovo's netbook will be capable of. By that time, a number of new similar products will also be made available, so we should definitely see some diversity on the specialized market.