If this Digitimes report about Taiwanese PC maker Compal is to be the basis of when the Dell E-series netbooks will be made available, well it looks like it won’t be in the near future after all.

According to Digitimes, Compal which is targeting to ship one million netbooks by the end of this year. Among these netbooks which Compal intends to manufacture and release is of course, much talked about and highly anticipated E-series netbooks.

Compal’s CEO Ray Chen expects to see an increase in the company’s notebook shipment by 20% in the second half of the year. Chen also predicted that netbook prices will go down to as low as $99 pretty soon, vendors need to lower their prices to be competitive in the netbook market.

In a related article, research firm Gartner though, is predicting that the $100 netbook will not materialize in the next three years, considering that all netbooks available today cost more than $100. And besides Gartner researchers believe that IT companies must not act to hastely in bringing down the cost of netbooks so much so that its capabilities will tend to suffer.

But with the proliferation of other models of netbooks brandishing prices as low as $130. It will just be a matter of time before we have “a real” $100 netbook. In fact, we’ve already featured a $99 netbook from Hong Kong. So, three years might be a long time to predict for the $100 dollar to materialize.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 1:03 pm and is filed under eeepc.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.