Vizio, a company well known for its cheap flat panel TVs, is now entering the PC market and will launch at least three laptops in 2012 according to their CTO. Vizio will be at the CES 2012 show next week in Las Vegas and will be showing off three new laptops. The CTO, Matt McRae, said in an interview with Bloomberg that the laptops would go on sale by June at a “price that doesn’t seem possible”. Since we’ve already witnessed $299 laptops from Lenovo being sold in Best Buy recently, you have to wonder how low Vizio can really go with pricing. In the article it is mentioned that Vizio plans to enter the ultra thin and light category, which can only mean an ultrabook. Right now ultrabooks retail for around $1,000 so there’s definitely room for Vizio to undercut the competition.Based on some early pictures released of the Vizio laptop it seems to confirm that at least one of the offerings will be an Ultrabook:
You’ll notice that there are very few ports on the Vizio 14-inch laptop for which we have pictures and it’s got a very slim profile at the front:
While we don’t have specs for the Vizio laptops yet, you can at least see in the pictures above it will have a couple USB 3.0 ports, HDMI (to connect to your cheap Vizio TV!) and most likely Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor since they’re looking at a June release.
Vizio has entered the tablet market recently by introducing an Android OS based 8-inch screen tablet that retails for $300. While that’s far cheaper than an Apple iPad that costs $599, it’s still not as cheap as the HP TouchPad that sold for $99 during the HP fire sale last July. The Amazon Kindle Fire and Blackberry Playbook, while admittedly smaller with a 7-inch screen, retail for $199 and $249 respectively and so already Vizio is not winning the price war in the tablet space. For that reason it remains to be seen whether Vizio really will offer a product that wins on price and features in the laptop market.
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