Vendors Plan U.S. Strategies, BenQ Eyes Home Market
"Initially, IT was for work, now it's for play," Lee said. "This working and playing are the two major themes of BenQ's strategy,to provide solutions for both of these worlds."
BenQ has launched several new notebooks, LCDs, wireless televisions and mobile phones in Asia and Europe since the spring that will be available in the U.S. market next year, Lee said.
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Taiwan President Chen Shui-Bian opens last week's Computex show.
In addition, BenQ hopes to strike a pact with Tech Data's new home networking business unit, expected to debut by year's end, said sources close to the deal. Tech Data was not immediately available for comment.
Other vendors showed wares ultimately destined for the U.S. channel, including motherboards for Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon 64 FX processor, launched last week.
While some vendors predicted they can ship Athlon 64 FX-based motherboards in a couple of weeks, others delayed their launches because of questions about which form factor AMD will eventually choose.
Most vendors are making motherboards that accept the 940-pin or the 754-pin version of the processor. However, they expect AMD to settle on a third form factor once it opens its next- generation manufacturing facilities, which means motherboards that comes to market now will have to be redesigned at that time.
Other vendors, including several motherboard suppliers, pushed into the wireless market here with gateways, interface cards and products to set up wireless access points.
Hao Zhang, director of new business development at Area Electronics Systems, a small distributor in Placentia, Calif., said he is encouraged by the large number of suppliers entering with wireless business. "That will definitely drive prices down," Zhang said.
Several vendors also dipped their toes into the storage space. Area Electronics just signed a distribution deal with Proware Technology, which supplies storage arrays using RAID 6.
New to storage are motherboard vendor Gigabyte, getting ready to ship a non-RAID array, and BenQ, which has invested in a joint venture to build optical storage devices.