Alternatives: Notebooks

Dell continues to hold sway over the notebook market, but a handful of alternative vendors are forcing the Round Rock, Texas-based company to loosen its grip.

Rather than go head-to-head with Dell in a price war, competitors, including IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba and Acer, are coming at the market leader from two angles: They're delivering high-end notebooks positioned as desktop replacements. And they're eyeing alternative markets, whether commercial, consumer, overseas or vertical.

"After Dell and HP, you have everyone else. But some are doing a good job of challenging them--like Lenovo going after the corporate market or Acer in various geographies," says Richard Shim, senior research analyst at IDC's Personal Computing program. "The question is, can they move that growth into the mature markets?"

Some VARs are hoping they can.

"The good news is that it looks like Lenovo will go hard at Dell," says Kent Lowe, business manager at Lake Technologies in Orlando, Fla. "For the first time in its shining history, Dell has caught some dings in the last quarter or two."

Other notebook vendors are recruiting VARs to resell feature-rich notebooks as desktop replacements or to push tablet PCs to vertical markets--two areas where Dell hasn't been particularly aggressive.

Toshiba, for instance, has recruited 25 ISVs to sell vertical solutions wrapped around its Tecra M4 tablet PC.

"Success won't be about who has the cheapest tablet PC, but who has tight engineering relationships with Intel and Microsoft to take advantage of dual-core chips and Vista," says Jerry Lumpkin, vice president of business channel sales at Toshiba America.

As for HP, VARs say they see a marked difference in its approach to the channel.

"They're on the phone with us a couple of times a month," says Matt Lolesar, CIO of MFK, San Diego. "It has definitely swayed our decisions."