Wal-Mart debuts $498 Linux laptop
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The computer, dubbed Balance, comes loaded with the Linspire operating system and the OpenOffice.org office suite, the companies said.
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(InfoWorld) - Underlining its expansion from online to retail sales, Dell launched desktop and notebook PCs Tuesday at Macy's department store in New York. The company announced nine new Inspiron desktops and notebooks and an XPS M1330 notebook, all available in a choice of eight shell colors. "The Dell of today is vastly different from the Dell of six months ago or even last week," said Alex Gruzen, senior vice president of Dellâs consumer product group. "We're here at Macy's in New York City. That alone is different for Dell, being in a department store or any kind of retail setting at all." Dell even set up a portable kiosk to take orders for the new PCs in a temporary space it will occupy at Macy's for the next two weeks, he said. The new Inspiron notebooks cost $749 for the model 1521 to $999 for the model 1720, with a choice of processors from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices. The Inspiron 1420 comes with an additional choice of Microsoft's Windows Vista or the Ubuntu Linux operating system, for $799. The Inspiron desktops start at $349 for models 530, 530s, 531, and 531s, all supporting up to 500GB of disk space to store digital media files, with the model 530 offering a choice between Windows and Linux. The XPS M1330 notebook costs $1,299 with a 13.3-inch widescreen display, weighs under 4 pounds, and comes with a one-year subscription to Dell's Online Backup service, where users can store 10GB of files on Dell servers for remote data access. In an effort to bolster its sliding market share and quarterly profits,Â Dell began selling certain PC models at Wal-MartÂ retail stores on June 10, marking the first time it had strayed from the direct sales model. Dell rose to prominence by cutting its costs through eliminating retail middlemen and selling its PCs through only its Web site, phone lines, and catalogs. That system began to fail in 2006, as competitors cut costs and Hewlett-Packard passed Dell to become the world's largest PC vendor. Now Dell is in the midst of a corporate reorganization announced May 31 that includesÂ laying off 10 percent of its 88,100 workers. Dell hopes its new retail presence will allow it to fix a strategic mistake. By trying to beat its competitors through low prices in recent years, Dell found itself spending all its publicity efforts promoting its least exciting products, Gruzen said. Selling PCs in retail stores gives Dell an opportunity to showcase its premium PC models and bring new luster to its corporate image at the same time. "This is really just a hint of what we're doing to get these exciting new products into customers' hands," Gruzen said. "We have a broader retail strategy, and over the coming months, we will announce more partnerships, both with Wal-Mart and with other retailers." Also on Tuesday, Dell unveiled a new marketing tagline -- "yours is here" -- that shares many values with HP's "the computer is personal again" campaign. Both companies are increasing the number of options they give customers to personalize PCs and bundling tools that make it easier to handle personal tasksÂ such asÂ digital photos and music as well as business jobs. Dell emphasized those increased choices with its color options for each PC, including pink, yellow, green, red, and blue, as well as standard white and black. An increasing number of PC vendors will soon begin to follow that pattern, trying to differentiate themselves with flashy style and design instead of solely through technical detailsÂ such asÂ processing power, according to a report released this week by Forrester Research. "The consumer PC industry is entering the Age of Style, a time in which radical form factor innovations, increased aesthetic diversity, and consumer choice and personalization will determine which models, and which PC vendors, win or lose," Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder said in the report.
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Attention Wal-Mart shoppers: There&#39;s a new laptop available and itâs cheap, really cheap. Working with operating system vendor Linspire--helmed by former mp3.
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Wal-Mart began selling $298 PCs from Everex on Wednesday that use Windows Vista, are free of so-called "bloatware" and feature open source software.
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With $100 rebate, Sears brings a Linux desktop PC from Linspire to a major national retailer that doesn't specialize in electronics.
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Wal-Mart is offering other Balance laptops with higher configurations, including one priced at $548 that comes with a 1.1 GHz AMD Athlon 4, 40 GB hard drive and a DVD-ROM drive.
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By the end of the week, Novell Inc.&#39;s new Linux desktop for enterprise customers, Novell Linux Desktop 9, Powered by SuSE Linux, will be available for purchase through Novell channel partners for a suggested price of $50 per system.
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(InfoWorld) - Tapping a new service from Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart joined a growing field of providers of digital video download services with the launch of an online movie store on Tuesday. The offering is built on HP Video Merchant Services, a Web-shopping technology also launched Tuesday that allows businesses to set up an online video store. HP holds hundreds of petabytes of digital films and TV shows in its data centers and provides back-office sales and search applications, said Willem de Zoete, vice president and general manager of Digital Entertainment Services at HP. Customers like Wal-Mart use the service as part of their online retail offerings, allowing cinema fans to browse movies based on genre or search by entering the name of an actor, director, or film. Customers can then download the movies to play on their PCs or portable video players or order a packaged disc to arrive in the mail, choosing a DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray format. A first-time user must install a program on the PC before starting the 30- to 45-minute process of downloading a 1.5GB movie over a typical household broadband connection, although most can start watching within five to 10 minutes, said Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart's divisional merchandise manager for digital media. Once the movie is downloaded, each user has the right to transfer it to three separate portable media players using Microsoft's Windows Media Player and to watch it an unlimited number of times. Customers who own media extender boxes can also play the digital file on TV screens, Swint said. The service will compete against Apple's iTunes store, which is limited to movies from Disney and Paramount in addition to TV and other programs. Other video download services are available from Amazon.com, AOL, Movielink, and CinemaNow. Microsoft also offers a movie and TV download service to Xbox users. Wal-Mart claims it has a market advantage over those sites since it offers movies from most of the major Hollywood studios and television networks. Compared to conventional movie rental stores, the digital movie rental industry is still struggling to build the size of its catalogs. Wal-Mart now sells about 3,000 of the movies and TV shows stored in HP's digital vaults and expects that number to rise quickly as content providers convert their own libraries to digital versions. "Today, the majority of movies are stored on tapes in buildings. That is a choke point at this moment in time. Part of my focus is to work with Hollywood studios to make movies available in digital file formats," de Zoete said. Another bar to building larger catalogs is that many obscure movie titles are never brought to the rental market if studios think demand is too small to sell the vast quantity of discs created in bulk reproduction batches, Swint said. That also stops retailers from taking advantage of the "long tail," the marketing theory that shops can make more money selling small quantities of each niche item than selling a large amount of trendy, short-lived items. To solve it, HP plans to offer "manufacturing on demand" in the future, opening up a huge catalog of old titles by producing a single disc to meet each online order. HP has started building a factory to do that work, and will add it to their Video Merchant Services package. In the meantime, Wal-Mart is selling new releases, which become available the same day as the DVD release, for $12.88 to $19.88. Older movies cost $7.50, and TV programs cost $1.96 per episode. DVD buyers will also have the option of paying an additional fee to download the digital version for playback on PCs and portable devices.
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Wal-Mart today unveiled a $298 desktop from Everex that combines three of the most popular industry trends.
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(InfoWorld) - Dell will begin selling two models of its desktop PCs at Wal-Mart Stores on June 10, fulfilling a series ofÂ recent hints from CEO Michael DellÂ that the company wouldÂ move beyond the direct sales modelÂ that once made it the world's largest PC vendor. Wal-Mart will sell the desktops for less than $700 each in its thousands of stores located in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, according to a Wal-Mart statement issued Thursday. The store also said it expected to offer additional Dell PC models in its Sam's Club and Wal-Mart Canada stores, but did not provide model names or dates. The Dimension Multimedia Desktop is the first model to reach Wal-Mart shelves, chosen as a good match for shoppers' demands for value pricing and proven technology, according to a statement by Gary Severson, Wal-Mart's senior vice president for entertainment and electronics. Wal-Mart already sells desktop PCs from Hewlett-Packard, Acer, and Gateway, as well as notebooks from HP, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony, Asus, and several smaller vendors. The store also sells monitors, PDAs (personal digital assistants), and peripherals. The strategy marks a major change in how Dell sells computers. Until now, the company has taken orders over the phone or via its Web site, allowed customers to choose their own specifications and then assembled a custom-built PC for each user. That approach allowed Dell to cut its storage and logistic costs far below its competitors, undercut their prices and win new market share. But the direct-sales business model is no longer such an advantage, since competing PC vendors say they have learned their lesson and trimmed their own costs. And critics note that buyers in developing countries don't trust their postal systems enough to purchase expensive PCs through the mail. "Customers want more and new ways to buy our products and we plan on meeting their needs on a global level. Offering Dell Dimensions in Wal-Mart is a great example of this approach," said Dell spokesman Dwayne Cox in an e-mailed statement. "While we can't get into specifics, in the coming quarters there will be additional activity in support of this move into global retail. Today's announcement with Wal-Mart represents our first step. Stay tuned," he added. Dell fell behind rival HPÂ in 2006 in PC sales, and has struggled with a series of poor earnings reports and lawsuits. In an attempt to reverse those results,Â Michael Dell returned to his job as CEOÂ in January, and immediately wrote a series of corporate memos pledging broad changes in the company. Now he has acted on those words. Â
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Dell has announced that it plans to start selling computers at Wal-Mart in June.
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Novell, one of the popular names in the open-source community, has launched Linux Desktop 9 OS for enterprise computer systems today for lower deployment and management prices.
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Two desktops and an Inspiron E1505n notebook PC running Ubuntu 7.04 Linux go on sale today.
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Walmart.com is offering a laptop that dives below the $500 pricepoint, and it&#39;s no accident the machine, from Linspire, runs a Linux-based operating system.
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Walmart and Linspire (formerly Lindows) have partnered up to sell a sub $500 laptop through the large retail chain. &quot;Walmart.
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  said on  Thursday it will charge less than $700 for two multimedia  desktop personal computer bundles from PC maker Dell Inc.   that it plans to start selling next month.
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Walmart.com is releasing the Balance notebook computer in conjunction with Linspire, which makes a Linux-based operating system designed for laptops.