I noticed a couple of days ago that Villman, one of the biggest PC retailers in our small nation, has begun offering their own brand of laptops (pictured here). Now, it’s obvious that they don’t have the ability to actually manufacture these things themselves so I was interested to find out how the original manufacturer was. Of course, that proved to be a bit more difficult than I thought, because none of the Villman staff have any idea about these things, and since it’s a fairly generic bit of engineering, looking at the make of the laptop itself doesn’t really provide any clues.
In fact, there were only two things unique about this machine: 1) its sloping keyboard, and 2) the included Power Cinema app (which allows you to play DVDs and other media without booting into Windows). Now, Power Cinema isn’t exactly the most common of utilities to be preinstalling in your laptops, so finding other retailers that sold laptops with this app included was pretty easy. This notebook, available at Walmart of all places, was at the head of the my search results and it matched the specs almost exactly. It turns out that the manufacturer was this Taiwan-based company called Tatung, who has been trying over the past year “to build its brand name in the US after gaining more recognition in the market from sales of its flat-panel televisions” (writeup here), which explains why I’ve never heard of it.
Anyway, after looking at the Tatung notebook images, I can say with reasonable certainty that the Villman Viper Notebooks are rebranded Tatungs. Of course, I’m not saying that that’s bad or anything — it’s not like I know anything about this brand, so I can’t rightly comment on their quality.
To be honest, I don’t even know why I went to so much trouble. I guess it was fun playing detective … too bad the “mystery” unravelled itself so easily.