Intel’s marketing chief Sean Maloney said at the Intel Investor meeting that some netbook resellers saw 30 percent return rate. He said the return rate was high because retail stores were selling netbooks as notebooks.

“In the first period – June, July, August of last year – there were some in the retail channels that were shipping (netbooks) as notebooks,” Sean Maloney said. “They were running ads that had a continuum of notebooks and had this netbooky thing in there – it was called a notebook. They had very high return rates and a couple of these guys had return rates in the 30 percent range, which is a disaster.”

Intel is now focusing on differentiating the two segments, so that people don’t buy netbooks expecting notebook level performance. Intel says this would result in healthier growth with lower return rate. To demonstrate the performance difference between netbook and notebook, Intel ran a high-definition video of the NBA basketball playoffs on the two systems at the investor meeting. The Atom powered netbook was jerky and dropped frames, whereas the Core 2 Duo powered laptop played the video smoothly.

Intel also showed a slide highlighting different purposes for both the systems. Intel is trying to clearly define differences between its performance notebooks, CULV notebooks and netbooks. So that the customer can make informed decision based on their needs.

For average customers a netbook can’t be their primary computing device, it is basically a companion device that you can use for web surfing and light multimedia, while you are travelling. Netbook processors are not powerful enough and their screen size is not big enough for day to day computing use.
[Via CNET]