14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, a survey was carried out in the APEJ region (Asia/Pacific excluding Japan), covering Australia, India, Korea, Malaysia, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, in order to determine the end-users' preferences for new PCs, and which spot in their preference list went to notebooks and netbooks, respectively. Surprisingly, even with all the heavy promotion of netbooks (ultra-low cost, portable personal computers, but with no computing or graphics performance to speak of), notebooks still has precedence in the hearts of buyers.
“Despite netbooks flying off the shelves, which helped to buoy PC volumes especially during the economic crisis in 2009, limited cannibalization of regular notebook sales is expected across the region. Among the survey respondents, 60% indicated that they would still purchase a regular notebook as their next PC,” Reuben Tan, senior manager of Asia/Pacific personal systems research at IDC, said.
Although the devices being quite popular, used for online news and information, followed by entertainment/games, and educational purposes, the percentage of those employing them only exceededs 30% in Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Chinese, Indian, Malaysian and Singaporean buyers added that any new PC purchase was directly dependent on the length of warranty and after-sales support, with the PC brand and store location being the least of their concerns.
System designers and vendors have been popularizing netbooks on all media they could find but, in the end, notebooks are still some ranks above them in the public eye. This is understandable. There is only so much net-surfing one can do, and netbooks are just that: netbooks. Most of them are just good enough for enjoyable Internet surfing and basic media playback (with few exceptions), but lack the resources for much else. Notebooks, on the other hand, can not only handle the Internet with no problems, but they can even pack enough computing and graphics processing power to seamlessly play even the most recent games, as well as easily handle any 3D applications.
In the end, desktop and notebook superiority, performance-wise, compared to ULCPCs, seems to be the determining factor, an idea that seems to be enforced by how most average households in the APEJ region have two PCs, with a netbook as just an extra.