Oct 28, 2001

Mitac International Corp. a major Taiwan PC manufacturer, will extend its production into cellular phones by offering "smar phones" firstly at the end of this year.

Based on its PC manufactguring capability, Mitac has extended into production of hand-held LCD products. The company has offered PDAs and WebPads, and will further enter into production of cellular phones.

Mitac has almost finished the development of the smart phone model, which is characterized by color screens and function of processing multimedia images. The cellular phone will be produced at the company's factory in Linkou, Northern Taiwan. If the order volume will grow to a certain level, the company will shift the production to its factory in mainland China.

The Production of smart phones will initially be carried out on an OEM basis only. Sales under the Mitac's own brand will be considered later, pending market condition development.

In related news, Mitac has obtained licensed use of Microsoft's operating system WinCE for making PDAs, and is further scrambling for Microsoft`s licensing for marketing PDAs under own brand.