I’ve written about this in the past – the pricing of some netbooks / sub-notebooks and how some of them seemed a bit high. Now we are reaching a point where there is some real competition (from Acer and Lenovo). Last month, we saw a $100 rebate on certain 8.9″ Intel Mobile Celeron-powered Asus Eee PC 900 models. It went on for the full month at several online retailers in the US and it dropped the price below $450 in some cases.
The same $100 rebate (or rather a new one) is currently available on some models at Amazon.com through the end of the month. It’s also showing up for various models of the Asus Eee PC 900 at MWave.com as well as at Buy.com, and OnSale.com
. A quick check of Amazon UK as well as a few other distributors in Europe doesn’t show the rebates (or price drops), but I’m sure we’ll see something in regards to pricing at some point.
With September coming up in less than a few weeks, and with the Acer Aspire One available now (at $379 and $399), and the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 shipping in September for around $430 (and presumably the Dell Inspiron 910), it really makes me wonder when Asus is going to permanently drop the price on these things (as well as drop the prices on their Atom-based lines, along with MSI on the Wind netbooks).
I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of the Intel Mobile Celeron in these things versus the Intel Atoms in the Asus Eee 901 (and the above mentioned Acer and Lenovo models). The average consumer that this market is oriented towards is not going to know the difference or care. I take that back. They’ll hear “1.6GHz Atom versus 900MHz Celeron” or “120GB HDD versus 20GB SSD” and they’ll respond accordingly.
Intel has officially revealed information about the first of the dual-core Atoms, the Atom 330. The version mentioned is the desktop version (N330), but much of it applies to the netbook market since the chipsets, specs, etc., are so similar.