New and improved?
When PC giant Acer bought Packard Bell (PB) back at the start of 2008, many of us wondered what the point was. The two companies produce similar products and PB's strength in Europe was nothing on Acer's.
A year and a half down the line Acer has decided what it's going to do with PB, as well as Gateway, which it acquired six months earlier. They're going to be the ‘lifestyle' side of Acer - for people who don't want to have to think too much about spec and just have a brand they trust.
If you think that sounds a bit like marketing guff, so did we, and said so when we wrote about the rebrand back in April. A few weeks ago we spoke to PB UK country manager Sylvain Braem in front of the TV cameras and gave him the opportunity to correct our assumptions.
In the interview, Braem also takes us through a bunch of new notebooks and reveals PB's new channel strategy, which we saw evidence of today.