Vizio has been making low cost HDTVs for quite some time now and it seems the company might be bored of simply making money in one concentrated area. During the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Vizio announced that they would enter the PC market with all-in-one computers and notebook offerings.
Vizio claims these computers are high performance machines of “elegant industrial design.” The company also touts that they will change how consumers view computing. That seems like a big job to take on considering the increasing popularity of tablets and the fact that companies are backing out of the PC market. IBM has already pulled out of the consumer PC business and HP almost followed suit.
Vizio apparently feels there is still money to be made in this area and is planning to release two all-in-one desktop machines and at least two thin and light notebooks. The word ultrabook is not used in any of the details that Vizio has released about those notebooks, however, the only image of a notebook on their site is conveniently named “computing-ultrabook.”
There are a few images of these proposed machines on Vizio’s CES website but no real specifics beyond a Spring 2012 release timeframe. You can see a USB 3.0 port on one of the notebooks, right next to the headphone jack.
On that same site there is an image of a 10” Vizio tablet, which the company mentioned will include WiFi during CES proceedings. There is no information about what that tablet will contain and the only info on the site is an image and the fact that it is “coming soon.”
Vizio was very successful in bringing low cost but fully featured HDTVs to market, but the consumer PC industry is a whole other animal. It will be interesting to see if the company has any success in this market when these machines debut in the Spring.
