Me too
The stampede to enter the sub-notebook market continues unabated according to the Financial Times today.
In a story entitled “Toshiba, Sony and Fujitsu in laptop price war” the FT refers to at least two Taiwanese industry sources for confirmation that contract laptop maker Quanta is making a sub-notebook for Sony, Inventec is making one for Toshiba and Fujitsu is making its own.
This marks a late entrance to a party hosted by Taiwanese Asus, which launched the first sub-notebook late last year and sold them by the bucket load. Other Taiwanese companies like MSI and Acer jumped on the bandwagon earlier this year and the big US vendors – HP and Dell – have announced their offerings.
The story suggests that Japanese companies may have dragged their heels a tad because they are strong on the premium-end ‘ultra-mobile’ laptops that, unlike sub-notebooks, are fully specced laptops that are engineered to be as small and light as possible. These tend to be among the most expensive laptops you can buy.
Sub-notebooks, in contrast, sacrifice features and performance to be small, light and most importantly cheap: at most £400 and, ideally, between £200 and £300. You can see why the Japanese companies might not have been too keen on them, but they have now apparently bowed to the inevitable.
Have Sony, Toshiba and Fujitsu left it too late? Can they offer anything that isn't alreadyavailable in the increasingly crowded sub-laptop market? Let us know your views in theHEXUS.community.
Related reading:
HP focusing on education sector for its sub-notebook offering
