Taiwan PC vendor Acer, which has been focusing on the consumer market and fighting for space in retail stores, is turning its attention back to the North American small- and midsized-business market. The company announced today that it would begin selling its low-cost Extensa 4620 notebook into the North American market for the first time; these 14.1-inch laptops come equipped with either an Intel Core 2 Duo or a Pentium dual-core processor, and Acer has done its best to keep the prices down for the notebooks. The Pentium-based laptop starts at $699 and the Core 2 Duo machine starts at $799.
The aggressive pricing of these SMB notebooks should allow Acer to continue competing against the bigger names in the market—in particular, Hewlett-Packard and Dell—as well as against other Asian-based PC vendors, such as Toshiba. In October, Toshiba launched its new Satellite Pro series, which is based on Advanced Micro Devices processors, with starting prices of about $699.