Netbooks are the hottest-selling segment in the PC industry because they cost less and weigh less than full-featured notebooks

For now Dell Inc., which is based in Round Rock, Texas, and trails Hewlett-Packard Co. in worldwide PC sales, is advising analysts that improvement in its business still varies significantly by region and product type.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden said U.S. sales are "not necessarily getting a lot better," but they're "finding a bottom" in the quarter that ends July 31.

"ODMs were advising their customers to switch to full-metal cases," Freedman said of his discussions with ODMs. "Cost-reduction features are going to be hard in that form factor on the industrial design side," he said.

Intel issued a statement Wednesday saying that the case problem that Freedman refers to has nothing to with Intel processors. "Case design issues reported to be found by an ODM, not consumers, in early production units for ultra-thin laptops Fujitsu FPCBP80 Battery have nothing to do with Intel processors whatsoever. We want to be clear that this is not a CPU design issue," Intel said in a statement.

Gauna added that ARM chip technology may make AMD even less competitive down the road as future devices adopt these chips. ARM is a low-power chip design used by Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Apple, Acer Aspire 3500 battery,Samsung, and others.

Of course AMD doesn't see it this way. Dirk Meyer, AMD's president and CEO, said in a statement Tuesday that "new platform, microprocessor, and graphics introductions planned for the second half of 2009 position us well to improve (profit) margins and meet our financial goals for the year."

What he's not enthusiastic about: Netbooks. He took the opportunity during the earnings call to take a few more swipes at the growing category of computing. It's a category that every one of Apple(17-inch PowerBook G4 battery)'s competitors in the PC industry have embraced, yet Cook picked up where he left off during the previous quarter's earnings call in politely trashing the devices.

Netbooks are the hottest-selling segment in the PC industry because they cost less and weigh less than full-featured notebooks. The tradeoff is a slower processor and less memory than notebooks,Dell Vostro 1500 battery, but they apparently offer the performance to handle simple tasks like Web surfing, e-mail and word processing.

Tech companies are coming up with new ways to market their gadgets to budget-conscious customers, too. Dell(Dell Inspiron 6000 battery), HP, and others are striking partnerships with U.S. wireless carriers such as AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) to sell subsidized portable computers and other devices if consumers sign up for service contracts. "We think that's going to be a big business," says Ronald G. Garriques, president of Dell's consumer division.