HP's $99 TouchPad fire sale 2.0: So much has changed

Summary: The time between HP’s $99 TouchPad sales was less than four months, but the tablet market aftermath will be long-lasting.

Hewlett-Packard will kick off another $99 TouchPad sale via eBay. One catch is that these TouchPads are refurbished. The other catch is that the tablet market has completely changed since the first time HP had a TouchPad liquidation sale.
A bevy of folks are hot and heavy for the $99 TouchPad sale on eBay as outlined by TechCrunch, but the run this time will be nothing like the first go-round. Why? Tablets with actual ecosystems and apps are nearing the $199 mark. The funny thing is HP’s first TouchPad sale started the race to the bottom for tablets.

HP’s first fire sale in August was sheer bedlam. A tablet for $99! We all clicked and wasted hours trying to get one. Some of us were even dumb enough to go to Best Buy and look for one. The TouchPad looked like a screaming deal when all tablets were going for $499 and up.
We endured so much of this:

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After the TouchPad fire sale 1.0 ended it was clear that there was a new magic price for tablets. In fact, you almost feel silly for wanting a TouchPad the first time.
Enter Amazon’s Kindle Fire. At $199, the Kindle Fire is a tablet equivalent of the razor-razor blade model. Buy the tablet, Amazon takes a small loss and then makes it up on movies, music, e-books and apps. Now Research in Motion is taking hefty financial charges and playing the $199 game too. It has no choice.
Related: Great Debate: Are $200 tablets a game changer? | Great Debate: Kindle Fire or iPad: Which one should you buy?
The tablet market’s race to the bottom only took a few weeks.
So this Sunday, the second version of HP’s TouchPad fire sale will be almost nostalgic—at least in tech terms. HP blew up the tablet market and we’re on the way to an everyday price of $99 in the not-too-distant future. The time between $99 TouchPad sales was less than four months, but the aftermath will be long-lasting.

Dell slims notebook line with Inspiron 13z, 14z

Summary: Dell’s newest Inspiron 13z and 14z notebooks are budget-minded consumer laptops that are both thin and capable.

Thinner. Lighter. The familiar drumbeat of laptop advancement continues with Dell’s latest offerings, the improved Inspiron 13z and 14z.

Both the 13z (denoting a 13.3-in. widescreen display) and 14z (14-in. display) are offered with your choice of an Intel i3 or i5 processor. Both displays are rated at 720p HD resolution.
At slightly less than an inch thick, the 14z isn’t as thin as it could be thanks to a tray-loading DVD combo drive. (One could only guess how much thinner the device could have been if Dell opted to include a slot-loaded drive — or remove the thing entirely. Does anyone still use these things?)
As for the 13z…well, you can’t buy it: it’s only available in “select Asian countries,” not North America. That’s a real shame, because with a design that eschews an optical drive and an option for a 128 GB solid state drive, the smaller “Z” model sounds a lot more compelling than its larger sibling.
But hey, at $599, the 14z is no slouch in the budget category.
[Dell Inspiron 14z]

Report: Lenovo is now No.2 PC maker; Dell says it doesn’t care

Summary: Lenovo becomes the No.2 PC firm in global market share. Dell, which used to be No. 2, says it doesn’t care — because it’s a solution provider rather than a pure PC firm.

According to data from Gartner, HP remained the top dog in PC market share, Lenovo vaulted to No. 2 as its share rose from 11.1% to 13.5%, while Dell dropped to 3rd place as its share came down to 11.6%.

Yang Yuanqing, CEO of Lenovo, ascribes this increase to Lenovo’s long-term promise to PC customers. As a result, Lenovo got a bump in both consumer and commercial markets.
But Dell didn’t pay much attention to Lenovo’s getting ahead. In this week’s Dell World in Austin, Texas, Dell’s CEO Michael Dell told reporters: Lenovo may get a larger share in the PC market, but Dell is better at revenue and profit, at which Lenovo cannot catch up.

Michael Dell, CEO of DELL

Michael Dell says that Dell is not only a PC manufacturer but also a solutions company, which provides its customers with PC, storage, server, data center and cloud computing technology, etc.
However, both Lenovo and Dell are challenged by Apple’s competitiveness in mobile market.
In the coming months, to rise to the challenge, Lenovo will launch new products including a ThinkPad Tablet. By the end of this year, it will launch a  second-generation LePhone- Phone S2.
Michael Dell says Dell is keen on the opportunities brought by Microsoft Windows 8 to Tablet PC. He stresses Dell will not give up in the PC market, “DELL is an end-to-end IT solution provider.”

Report: Dell's slim XPS 14z rises to challenge MacBook Pro

Summary: With the 14z, it’s clear that Apple’s steller design tastes spreading to even Dell.

 

Apple’s MacBook is getting a lot of competition in recent months, and Dell is adding to it with its latest notebook, the XPS 14z.

The first thing you’ll notice about the 14z is its screen. By minimizing the 14z’s bezel, Dell managed to squeeze a 14-inch display into a 13-inch chassis, making the device nearly borderless.
Unlike the smaller 13z that it was announced with in August, the 14z features an internal optical drive, which, understandably, makes it a whole lot thicker the recent slew of notebooks that have dropped the feature. Alongside the 14z’s 1.3 mega-pixel camera and pair of USB ports Dell is also offering the option of a discrete NVIDIA graphics card.

And then there’s the design. Weighing at 4.36 pounds and measuring at just less than an inch thick, the 14z’s thin frame rivals the design of even the MacBook Pro. And speaking of Apple’s hardware, comparisons to the MacBook line should be pretty evident here, as it has been with many of the Ultrabooks.

On matters of price, the entry-level Core i5 version of the device sells for $999, with its more advanced NVIDIA GeForce-equipped counterpart retailing for $1599. The 14z hits stores November 1st.