Netbook PCs make major inroads in local IT market

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Tech-savvy young visitors admiring the ranges of digital gadgets at the BCS ICT World 2009 Fair in the city Friday. The five-day long annual fair concludes today (Saturday). — FE Photo

Mehdi Musharraf Bhuiyan
Ultra portable subnotebooks or netbooks are rapidly gaining popularity in the country's vibrant PC market as evident from the latest bout of the annual ICT fair currently being held in the city.
Despite lacking some basic features like a built in optical drive, these petite cousins of more familiar notebook PCs are drawing significant attention in this year's BCS ICT World 2009; owing to their lower than conventional size and price.
Beginning from Tuesday last, the 16th edition of the flagship event of the country's ICT world ends today (Saturday) at the Bangabandhu International Conference Center of the capital.
"A typical netbook- no matter of what brand, usually weighs less than a kg- which is almost half in mass than the lighter ranges of notebooks, while their screen size hardly cross the 10 inch mark", explains an exhibitor at the fair.
Equally attractive are the price ranges of these ultra portable laptops; which, thanks to fair discounts, has been found to be as low as Tk. 23,500 for some brands.
Netbooks first came to fore in the local market back in 2008; when the Taiwanese high-tech giant duo Acer and Asus brought their groundbreaking Acer Aspire One and Asus EEE PC in the Dhaka outlets followed by their successful launch in international scene.
Other big names in the PC market followed soon and by the beginning of 2009, almost every laptop brand available in the market had their own version of netbooks to offer.
Never before however, these ultraportable subnotebooks have featured so numerously at any big event of ICT in Bangladesh; industry insiders said, which is a significant promotional boost for these emerging segments of PC market.
"I found these netbooks quite smart", said a visitor after experimenting with one of them for a while, "these machines are so lightweight and handy", while admitting that he has to get himself used to it before buying a PC without any optical drive.
From the more pricey brands like Apple or Sony Vaio and more popular HP, Dell, Toshiba or Lenovo to emerging names like BenQ, every brand have displayed at least one or two models of netbooks in their stalls. The typical price of these laptops is ranged between Tk. 35000 to Tk. 24000.
"Netbooks can be possibly a big deal in Bangladeshi market", admits an industry insider, "they may not grab any bulk market share but even then, their cheaper price range is well suited with the emerging markets". He added.
Apart from netbooks, another major attraction of this year's fair was Qubee. Weeks after the formal launching of this high speed Internet service in the country, this WiMax provider has unveiled a revamped and less expensive price package for its service on the eve of the fair while offering the visitors free ride to the WiMax experience.
Like any other year, major dealers in the PC market have introduced a range of new models of various brands. These include Acer Aspire 4736Z and 4810Z, Lenovo G450 29492KQ and 294955Q, Intel i5-750 and i7-860 processors as well as Toshiba TECRA M10-P463.

Prices of notebooks can be as much varied as the number of brands and models, so that they range from Tk. 36000 to as high as Tk. 155,000. But an average laptop usually is priced between Tk. 50,000.00 to Tk. 70,000.00.
A number of stalls have been dedicated to selling locally produced multimedia CDs- which offers a wide variety of cartoons and educational software targeted at young children.
A range of computer accessories and digital equipments like USB flash drive, portable hard drive, memory module, flash card, digital multimedia player and photo frame also featured prominently in this year's fair.