Carphone ups the ante in laptop giveaway

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 10 Sep 2007 at 14:53

Carphone Warehouse is making a mockery of PC World's decision to end its free laptop offer by vastly increasing the number of Dell machines it plans to give away.

In what looks like a carefully orchestrated game of one-upmanship, Carphone says it now plans to give away 160,000 free Dell laptops to new subscribers of its AOL Broadband service.

The company claims it originally intended to distribute only 100,000 machines, but says that huge demand has led it to expand the offer. "As there were 50,000 people signed-up in the first seven weeks, we upped the amount," says a spokesman for Carphone Warehouse.

PC World canned its free laptop offer in less than a month, after "tens of thousands" of free laptops were snapped-up by subscribers to Orange's broadband service. PC World insiders admit the company didn't anticipate demand would be so high, and that the company expected its designated stock of free laptops to last for months rather than weeks. The high-street giant is now offering hundreds of pounds off new PCs rather than giving them away.

Carphone Warehouse's free Dell laptop comes with a fairly modest spec: Intel Celeron 540 processor, 1GB of RAM, 80GB hard drive and Vista Home Basic. However, customers can pay to have their machines upgraded. They must also sign up for two years of AOL Broadband at £19.99 per month and pay a £14.99 delivery charge.