Asustek and Acer Team Up with Telcos to Offer Dirt Cheap Netbooks

Both Asustek and Acer are reportedly prepping up plans to offer their netbooks as promotional bundles with 3G online services. Asustek has already made some agreement with NTT Docomo in Japan to offer the Eee PC 701 for $.91 bundled with the company’s 3G service. Next up, it is also planning to team up with both T-Mobile and TNT in Europe to offer the Eee PC for $1.52 which is also tied-up with the companies telecoms package.

Perhaps taking a cue from Asustek, Acer is also looking at offering the same packages for their Aspire One. Acer is hell bent on achieving its five million sales target, and perhaps the best way they could achieve this is to get into these kinds of promotional gigs.

The only difference among these two companies way of marketing their netbooks is the fact that Asus is promoting its oldest netbook model which is the Eee PC 701 since it has released so many upgrades of the netbook already, and this might well be just left-over supplies which remained in their inventory. As for Acer’s Aspire One, the netbook has only been released not so along ago and it hasn’t reached the same popularity level as the Eee PC 701. So, it might still be a little early to offer the netbook at such dirt-cheap package.

But then, a corporate sales target must still stand and must be achieved at whatever cost, right ACER?

Acer has also talked with several telecommunication vendors for cooperation, which could bring the netbook bundle price down to zero which is the main reason Acer is still confident of achieving its shipments goal of five million units in 2008, the sources believe.