Acer Steals Third Place - Mobile PC Sales - Dell Stumbles

Over at the iSuppli Corp. web sites, they have compiled the Q4 sales of mobile PC sales and Acer has taken the number three position. HP retains it’s lead as number one, with Dell hanging on to the number two position So just to see what I could get for my money for the biggest bang for my buck, I thought I would snoop around the internet to see what kind of a deal I could get on laptops manufactured by the three leaders. iSuppli Corp stats here.
I set my goals as follows:

Intel Core 2 duo processor or AMD X2 processor, 1G Ram, and Microsoft Vista Home Premium w/Aero support, DVD-RW , 15.4 widescreen, and wifi as the bottom line requirements. If the spec’s were higher, that would be nice also. And I set a target price of $900, hopefully less would also be nice. This would not include taxes and shipping, unless I could find it for free.

I first took a look at Circuit City:

Acer Aspire AS5610-4491 15.4″ Widescreen Notebook $699.00 on sale after rebate

HP Pavilion dv6324us 15.4″ Widescreen Notebook PC for $799.00 after rebate

Then over to Best Buy - nothing cheaper for these two brands. How about Staples?
Nope, nothing cheaper.

So over to Dell:

E1505 model for about $728.00 on sale

So basically the big three have their systems priced about the same for similar specification machines. So than why is Dell tanking out in the market place?

IMHO - poor customer service.

What’s your thinking? Is there something else causing Dell to slide while Acer is picking up the pace? What is HP doing right?

Comments welcome.

[tags]dell, hp, acer, notebook, laptop, sales, [/tags]