Dell notebooks to sell at Sam's Club shops
updated 02:50 pm EDT, Fri June 8, 2007
Dell Notebook at Sams Club
Dell's first notebooks to reach retail shelves will at Sam's Club, the computer maker said today. It revealed that the 15.4-inch, AMD-based Inspiron E1501 would reach 500 of the Wal-Mart operated stores beginning sometime next week, representing the first time any Dell portable would be available beyond direct orders. Exact specifications haven't yet been released but are expected to involve a better-than-basic model with a Turion 64 X2 dual-core CPU, 2GB of memory, and a 120GB hard drive preloaded with Vista Home Premium, Dell has said.
Official pricing was not provided by Dell, though pricing the upgraded system through Dell's website set its minimum cost to end-users at $1,018, significantly higher than the $649 starting model. A final price tag of $1000 or less is likely but hasn't been confirmed.
The decision comes shortly after Dell announced that it would sell desktops in Wal-Mart as part of a major turnaround in its company's sales strategy, which until this year focused exclusively on phone and online orders. The Texas firm has been seeing a gradual decline in its share versus fellow American builder HP, which has seen rapid gains and already sells most of its PCs at retail in the US and abroad.
