Samsung to pull out of netbook market, will focus on ultrabooks

Come 2012, Samsung Electronics will be shutting down their netbook production in favour of tablets and ultrabooks. The Korean company supposedly sent an e-mail to one of their partners informing them that in the first quarter of next year, they will discontinue their 10.1-inch netbook line-up and will focus on more powerful 11.6-inch and 12-inch ultra-portable notebooks.

So much for cheap and affordable computing

This doesn’t really come as a big surprise, since it is something, which was long overdue. Looking at the current and past market trends, the netbook scene was and still is dominated by Asus, a company that popularized the netbook segment a couple of years back. Since then, everyone else has tried to grab a slice of Asus’s success and other than HP, I can’t think of anyone who has managed to achieve that success. Samsung has been dabbling with netbooks as well, but none of them really seemed to strike a chord with the audience. Once the tablet frenzy took over, most people migrated from 10.1-inch netbooks for 10.1-inch tablets, since the latter was more powerful, more ergonomic and offered a much better experience for media consumption, as compared to netbooks.

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A website called Blogeee, had sent out, “Following the introduction of our new strategy in 2012, we stop the production of the 10.1-inch range (netbooks) in Q1 2012 in favour of ultra-portable products (11.6-inch and 12-inch) and ultrabooks to be launched in 2012”. Samsung’s decision to discontinue this product line-up makes sense, since rather than just stringing it along, it’s better if they concentrated their resources on other segments that are actually trending.