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Netbook resellers saw 30% return rate

Netbooks had a rocky start last year in some markets, Intel's marketing chief said at the Intel investor meeting Tuesday. At the investor meeting, Intel demonstrated on stage the performance gap between a Netbook and a mainstream notebook. In the demonstration, a Netbook and a notebook ran the same high-definition video of the NBA basketball playoffs. The video on the Atom processor-powered Netbook was jerky and dropped frames, while the Core 2 chip-based notebook's video was smooth. The point was obvious: the Netbook's Atom silicon falls short in performing some tasks that a mainstream notebook handles with relative ease. No one mentioned anything about the NVIDIA Ion platform though!

"In the first period--June, July, August of last year--there were some in the retail channels that were shipping (Netbooks) as notebooks," Sean Maloney said in a question-and-answer session that was streamed over the Web. "They were running ads that had a continuum of notebooks and had this Netbooky thing in there--it was called a notebook. They had very high return rates and a couple of these guys had return rates in the 30 percent range, which is a disaster."

CNET News

Posted by | Wed, May 13, 2009 - 08:25 AM