PC vendors look to home-user segment

"For the digital home concept to take off, we need to listen to what consumers want and offer them desirable content applications."

John Fang, general manager of Gigabyte's system product business unit

Personal computers are set to flourish in the home segment as the digital home concept starts to gain ground, especially in the fourth quarter, computer vendors said yesterday.

"As digital home solutions become more mature, consumers now prefer to enjoy a digital lifestyle, such as listening to online music at home," said Benjamin Ou (歐明哲), senior product marketing manager at Hewlett-Packard (HP) Taiwan Ltd.

As Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition is set to hit local stores next week, the new platform will serve as a catalyst to accelerate the popularity of the digital home concept here, especially in the fourth quarter, he added.

A Media Center PC is designed to help home users manage digital content, including photos, television shows, movies or music stored on a desktop's hard drive. Its interface is different from the standard Windows XP platform, as it has larger icons designed to be visible to a user sitting on a couch away from a television or large screen.

According to Ou, over 50 percent of home users in the US have adopted Media Center PCs after its introduction last year, and the local market will show strong acceptance by the middle of next year as Taiwanese are usually fast adopters of new technologies.

Riding on the digital home trend, HP Taiwan will launch two Media Center PCs this month with price tags below NT$50,000, said Dennis Chen (陳敬宏), general manager of the firm's personal systems group.

Other vendors have similar plans, with Gigabyte Technology Co (技嘉科技) set to unveil two Media Center PCs priced below NT$30,000 during the same period.

"For the digital home concept to take off, we need to listen to what consumers want and offer them desirable content applications," John Fang (方永城), general manager of Gigabyte's system product business unit, said on the sidelines of a product launch yesterday.

According to Fang, home users are now keen on embracing bigger screens, multimedia content, as well as the high performance offered by desktop computers, which differentiates them from laptops.

The motherboard maker, which jumped into the brandname desktop business early last year, garnered around a 12 percent share of the local home desktop segment in the third quarter, up from a mere 6 percent in the first quarter. This makes it the third largest vendor in the home desktop segment, after Acer Inc and HP, he said.

The recent appointment of Xander International Corp (建達國際) -- a major distributor of computer and peripheral products -- as the new sales channel is expected to raise the firm's domestic desktop sales to around 6,000 units per month, from the current 4,000 units, he added.