UK gets a rough deal with Lenovo's netbooks

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 5 Aug 2008 at 10:34

British IT buyers are once again being given the rough end of the stick, this time with Lenovo's newly-announced netbooks.

Yesterday we revealed the US details of Lenovo's S10 netbook, which offers a 10.2in screen, 80GB hard disk and 512MB of memory starting from $399 - which is £203 at today's exchange rate.

Overnight the company sent us details of the UK launch, in which it was revealed the S10 will cost £319 inc VAT in the UK - more than £100 more for the same device.

However, the UK and Europe is also being treated to a device with an 8.9in screen, the S9, which will cost £279 inc VAT. That's still about £80 more expensive than its bigger brother in the US.

A Lenovo spokesman has defended the price differences. "As with most products, there is rarely a direct correlation between US and European prices," she claims. "The same applies to all sorts of goods from houses and cars to washing machines and jeans. It mainly boils down to economies of scale and reduced complexities in the US as a single country."

And she says the S9 is only being sold in Europe because of consumer demand. "The S9 proved as popular in customer previews as the S10 in EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa], hence the decision to launch both," she claims. "In EMEA we have a much wider and diverse country demographics. EMEA chose to launch both the S9 and S10 to ensure Lenovo offers the widest and most suitable products for emerging countries to mature regions."

The company is yet to decide which configurations of the machines will be made available in the UK when it launches in early October.