Netbooks have caught fancy of India’s young generation
India sold 25,000 netbooks during Q1 of calendar year 2009. Sales figures are 100% more than what has been for last quarter. So what is driving the figures northwards. Netbooks today is the only product in the PC segment which is registering positive growth albeit at the cost of regular notebooks and desktops.
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Netbooks typically have screen sizes ranging from 5″ to 13″ and price tags between Rs 11000 (USD 220) to Rs 15,000(USD 300). What has gone in favour of these miniature notebooks is the lower price and lower size. They are so handy that ladies and girls alike can stuff them in their purse. We have not done a gender distribution on sales figures but definitely the feminine gender has contributed towards pegging up netbooks sales.
Leave aside web development and flash based gaming, one can do almost everything with such cute items. The leaders in netbooks presently are Acer. Every other popular brand has either launched their netbook version or in the process of doing so.
The Operating System presently is being dominated by Windows XP. The popularity of netbooks has forced Microsoft to continue supporting their XP operating system as Vista can not run on netbooks efficiently. Windows 7, the next OS from Microsoft’s stable which is going to hit the market during later part of this year has special netbook version just to cater to the growing netbook market.
Netbooks are expected to give tough fight to even Amazon’s Kindle and Sony ebook reader. As the price difference between the two products narrows the coming times will see people preferring netbooks which can double up as ebook reader and a computing device.
The growth in netbooks will come about at the expanse of desktop and notebooks. Last year has already witnessed increasing pressure on notebooks prices. The coming year will be even worse.
Netbooks are here to stay. They have proved their skeptics wrong. When these netbooks were introduced earlier, the tech experts initially laughed at their hardware and ability. But the statistics of last one year just proves that netbooks can not be just ignored.
May also like to read: Netbooks Vs Notebooks
