While desktop computer market is weak these days, a lot of companies in the industry hope for great rise of demand for portable and mobile PCs. Nowadays there are technologies that can allow building really cheap notebooks and vendors are all going to make use of them this year and to launch ultra-cheap mobile computers.

The price war was started by Dell Computer earlier this month when the company began to offer its Inspiron 2650C based on the Mobile Celeron 1.60GHz processor. The part costs only $699 with mail-in rebate and seems to be quite popular, as all cheap products from Dell.

ECS will surpass its overseas rival by offering Transmeta Crusoe-based mobile PC for $599 in April. No details about this notebook are known, but sources said that the unit will be equipped with battery, unlike DeskNote PCs.

Taiwanese DigiTimes web-site claims that Inventec will contract manufacture a $500 low-price notebook for an international brand vendor in the second half of this year. Compal Electronics is also said to have landed orders to manufacture a low-price Presario notebook for Hewlett-Packard (HP), though specifics about the model and pricing are unclear.

With at least two worldwide-known PC vendors offering extremely cheap notebooks, we expect other companies to follow bigger brothers with their own low-price models. Manufacturers who are mostly targeted on cost-sensitive customers, such as ECS, are likely to offer something even cheaper in the second half of the year to maintain the position of being the manufacturers of the cheapest devices in the world.