Shenzhen FirstView, a Chinese-based company that was showing off a line of 7 to 10 inch mini-laptops running Windows CE and Windows XP at the Hong Kong Electronics Fare a few months back, is apparently hoping to bring some of these machines stateside. The folks at Laptop Magazine happened across a FirstView booth at CES, and says the company is looking for US companies to distribute the netbooks.
In other words, you probably won’t see a machine bearing the FirstView name anytime soon. The company is an Original Device Manufacturer, which means they build the notebooks, load the software, and sell them to distributors who will mark up the price a tiny bit, rebrand them, and then sell them through their own distribution chains. There were a ton of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong-based companies showing similar devices at CES. I’ll post a few more pictures over the next few days, but I have to warn you, many of these ODM netbooks look a lot alike.
