Friday, March 26, 2004
As the PC market becomes saturated and accompanied by bad global economy have drove many Taiwan PC makers to refocus their product strategy.
In 2000, PC market declined by 16.1 percent, -3.8 percent in 2001 and little growth in 2002 at 1.6 percent. Several local manufacturers have venture in new and promising such as tablet PCs, desknotes, mini-notebooks LCD PC and tower PC are available and need to revive and attract PC enthusiasts.
These promising IT devices did not agitate PC market but received many drawbacks. Tablet PC and LCD PC are said to be expensive, desknote is the combination of desktop PC features with notebook design gave too many problems because of dependent on an adaptor, mini-notebook PC is small and lack of processing power and features; while tower PC is too boring. These drawbacks drove local companies back to wall and what they did do was to investigate their very IT products such as barebone systems, thin client, micro ATX form factor and baby tower PC. By adding ingenuity and reduce the internal components and parts, mini PC was born.
 One of the leading mini PC makers, Shuttle was the first company to introduce "Skywalker" two years ago. Skywalker instantly attracted many user because of its unique features such as all-in-one including 4-USB ports, serial & parallel ports, LAN, VGA DIN, two- PS/2 ports, 5.25-inch drive bay, 3.25-inch drive bay and one unique design is its size, only half size of a standard desktop tower PC. The tag price of mini PC is around US$200~300, compared to a barebone system cost at staggering US$500. Ron Carlson, senior marketing executive of Shuttle, said the company has shipped 250,000 units in 2002, 360,000 units in 2003 and expecting to ship 500,000 units, a 50~75 percent growth for this year. Shuttle has sparked a whole new category of SFF, small form factor.
A forecast from Market Intelligence Center (MIC) showed that mini PC shipments will grow 38.4% to 2.29 million units this year, accounting for 1.9% of the estimate 119-million-unit desktop shipments. With around 30~50 percent growth, many local companies come with their own versions of mini PCs. Mini PCs have evolved and now several companies have added multimedia and entertaining features like DVD-ROM drives, Firewire ports for video streaming capability, 5.1 channel sound system, wireless LAN and DVI port.
Here are the mini PCs making giant waves.
 |
 |
| Shuttle's Next Generation XPC |
Micro Star International's Mega PC |
 |
 |
By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved
|
