Dell to leap into Eee PC territory?

Dell will be next to join the ranks of companies building micro notebooks, according to a claim made by one of its assemblers. An official from Taiwan-based Compal says that his company will produce between 200,000 and 300,000 "low-cost" notebooks a month for Dell starting sometime in 2008, with as many as one to two million readied by the end of the year. The unnamed executive doesn't provide details of the systems but notes that Compal could boost production if demand proves high.

The apparent reference would signal increasingly strong competition between PC makers competing for the new market for very small portables, which was started by ASUS' Eee PC but will soon be joined by models from Acer, ECS, and GigaByte and is now starting to include offerings from American companies, including Everex and the just-announced HP Mini-Note.

Dell primarily uses Intel processors and is most likely to use a variant on Intel's Atom should it decide to build a micro notebook.

The company hasn't commented on the report.

Filed under: computers, industry
Other story tags: Intel, Dell, ASUS, HP, Atom, Eee PC, Mini-Note, Compal