Samsung makes push for high-end notebooks

Samsung has introduced a family of notebooks to take on high-end giants such as IBM and Toshiba.

Ali Demin, a director of Samsung Electronics UK, said the company will recruit specialist portable dealers and extra corporate resellers for the Senspro 500 range, made by AST.

'We're introducing a u1 million promotion on Saturday which will include national advertising and marketing co-op funds for dealers,' he said.

Charles Bows, product marketing manager at Samsung, said the range will start with a #1,595 machine with a Pentium 100 chip and an 810Mb hard drive. The high-end model has a Pentium 150 and costs #2,999. It comes with 16Mb of memory, a CD-Rom drive and a 12in SVGA TFT screen.

Bows hit out at other manufacturers for their high pricing. 'The big names are maintaining artificial price premiums,' he said. 'Notebook performance has been related to status segmentation but users tell us the market is moving towards applications and not status. This segmentation will lead to new market leaders.

'The big names won't survive on their own and will have to listen to what users want.'

Samsung will introduce other Senspro models early next year.