The market for skinny laptops gets fat

Acer's 'first Internet device'
Acer this week launched the Aspire one, described by the company as its “first Internet device.” It is available online, and will be in Best Buy stores late next month.

Pricing begins at $379 for the Linux version of the 2.1-pound computer with an 8.9-inch screen and 8-gigabyte solid state drive, and goes up to $499, depending on the configuration purchased. Another version, with Windows XP Home, will be available in August, and starts at $399.

In April, HP came out with the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC, a model it dubs the “HP Mini,” which starts at $499, has an 8.9-inch screen, 4-gigabyte hard drive and weighs 2.6 pounds.

Originally, the Mini-Note PC was targeted “more at students and educational institutions, but we’re seeing much broader interest,” said Kevin Frost, HP’s vice president for consumer notebooks.

“There are consumers who just want to do a few things on a computer, and do them well,” he said.

“They want to get access to the Internet, they want to get access to e-mail, and they want to do that in a quick and convenient manner, so that’s the real value proposition of these notebooks. They’re lighter, smaller, easier to use and they use less power.”

The HP Mini is “almost an accessory notebook” as a second, or even third, laptop for some customers, including travelers, teenagers and those of “the MySpace-YouTube-Facebook generation,” Frost said.

“There’s such a strong demand by people looking for an easier way to get on the Internet. Some of the easiest-to-use consumer products, like an iPod or a cell phone, tend to be products that focus on just doing one or two things well. I think it’s a lesson that, sometimes as computer manufacturers, we struggle with because we try to have products that let everybody do everything.”

Small percentage of market
The ultramobile notebook market is still “very small,” said O’Donnell of IDC, which estimates it at between 2 and 3 percent of the worldwide notebook market, with between 65 million to 70 million notebooks shipped the first half of this year, he said.

And so far, it has been a market dominated by Asus.

“To Asus’ credit, they’ve created a product category essentially out of nowhere,” O’Donnell said. “They have raised their brand awareness level to a staggering degree. I mean, six months ago, if I’d asked you who Asus was, would you have known? Now, a lot of people do.”

In a report earlier this year, Gartner said “the new market segment for low cost ultraportable PCs is an expanded market, bringing in new users, rather than cannibalizing existing products.”

However, if prices on the little laptops aren’t all that much less than for full-sized notebooks, only consumers purely concerned with mobility may opt for the lighter devices.

“The real serious problem we see is that the price point on these things bumps into regular-size notebooks, and they do so in such a way that we think is going to limit the potential size of the market,” said O’Donnell.

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