Hewlett-Packard and Acer have lowered prices of their netbooks as the back-to-school sales season kicks into gear in the U.S., offering bargains for users.
Acer slashed prices on its Aspire one netbooks on Friday to as low as $329 for one version, while HP revealed new prices for Mini-Notes on its Web site.
[ For more on products in the hot mini-notebook category, check out our hands-on looks at Asus' Eee PC 901 and 1000, the Cloudbook Max netbook, Elitegroup's G10IL mini-laptop, MSI's Wind low-cost laptop, Giga-byte's M912X mini-laptop, HP's Mini-Note netbook and Acer's Aspire one. ]
Price-cutting by the two big PC vendors could prompt other netbook makers, such as Asustek Computer and Micro-Star International to follow.
Netbooks are mini-laptop PCs designed for mobility, and typically weighing less than 2 kilograms. Most of the components on board, including the microprocessor, are less powerful than those of full-fledged laptops, so batteries last longer. They're designed for Internet surfing and work on spreadsheets or word processor documents, not for heavy-duty gaming, video editing or other multimedia work.
The HP and Acer netbooks on sale both have 8.9-inch screens, smaller than the most common laptop PC screen size, 15.4 inches.
HP is offering reductions of $100 on some versions of the Mini-Note, with prices good through the end of August.
The biggest deals are in higher-end models, which run Microsoft's Windows Vista Business OS.
The price of the HP Mini-Note 2133 KR948UT has been slashed to $789 from $949, according to HP. The device has an 8.9-inch screen, uses a 1.2GHz Via C7-M microprocessor, has 2GB of DRAM and a 160GB hard disk drive (HDD) for data storage.
The lowest-priced Mini-Note running Windows Vista Home Basic is the KX868AT, which costs $599, down from $786, according to HP.
The lowest priced Mini-Note is the HP 2133 KR922UT at $499 on Amazon.com and elsewhere, but a better version of that netbook, the Mini-Note 2133 KX89AT offers a lot more for just $549.
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