Planet Lowyat

The Acer’s 8.9-inch low-cost PC or Asus EeePC competitor is expected to be priced around US$50 less than the free on board(FOB) price of Asustek Computer’s second-generation Eee PC.

With the company’s large economy of scale, Acer has set the FOB price of its low-cost PC at US$250-300, while the market ASP (average selling price) is estimated will be around US$350-400.

Asustek has decided not to engage in a price competition with Acer and has set the FOB price of its 8.9-inch second-generation Eee PC at around US$300-350, while the market ASP should fall between US$400-500, added the sources

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Asus recently announced their plans to ship five million Eee PCs this year, with 60% of them running Windows XP.

According to Download Squad, while the mass media is spinning this story to make it sound like Microsoft is eroding Linux’s market share, the opposite is so. Asus sold 300,000 units last year running Xandros Linux, a far cry from the 5 million they expect to sell this year. According to Vaughan-Nichols, Asus will ship more Linux PCs this year than “all other Linux PC vendors combined up until 2008″!

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Asus claims the majority of Eee PCs shipped this year will be Windows-based. “About 60% of them will have Windows XP operating system,” confirms Asus chairman Jonney Shih, reiterating his belief that the company will ship around five million units this year, up from the 300,000 units shipped in 2007.

   “A Windows Eee PC is more attractive to buyers because people are just not used to using Linux-based computers,” says Alvin Kwock, analyst at JP Morgan.

Microsoft believes the move will prove beneficial to both companies.

“There is a huge untapped computer market out there, and we want to get into the next ten billion consumer market (with these lower cost computers),” says Davis Tsai, president of Microsoft Taiwan.

Asus is working hard to promote the Eee PC brand, releasing a string of new models including the Eee PC 900 which features a 9in screen, and models with larger storage and memory capacities.

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Best Buy, once a Windows-only PC distributor, now sells Asus Eee PCs, which run the Linux distribution Xandros on its website.

Last year, Asus sold more than 300,000 copies of the small Linux laptop. The company has a very optimistic view for this year, predicting to sell several millions of copies. Best Buy sells the subnotebook in three versions: the pink, the white and the galaxy black models.

These laptops feature an Intel Celeron M processor at 900Mhz, 512 MB of DDR2 memory, a 7-inch widescreen display with a resolution of 800 x 480, a 4GB flash-based SSD hard disk, built-in web cam and Xandros Linux, but there’s no optical drive present. The EeePC has shock-proof design, to prevent accidents and data loss. Also, three high-speed USB 2.0 ports for fast digital video, audio and data transfer and a Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard slot are included.

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According to Digitimes, Acer plans to launch low-cost notebooks available with 8-inch and 9-inch displays late in the first quarter or early second quarter of this year, with the products aimed at competing directly at similar sized Eee PCs from Asustek Computer, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report. Prices of Acer’s low-cost notebooks will be as competitive as those of the Eee PCs, the paper said.

Acer will outsource the production of its low-cost notebooks to Wistron, while purchasing LCD panels from AU Optronics (AUO), which will produce 8- and 9-inch panels at its fifth-generation (G5) production lines for both Acer and Asustek, the paper indicated

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