Hewlett-Packard Co., the No. 1 seller of personal computers worldwide, said Tuesday it’s throwing its weight behind a new class of miniaturized laptops, a fledgling market already populated with products from Intel Corp., the world’s largest semiconductor company, and Asustek Computers Inc., the world’s largest maker of computer motherboards

The machines are so new the industry hasn’t settled on a name for low-cost and scaled-down laptops used primarily for surfing the Internet and performing other basic functions like word processing.

Intel has labeled them “netbooks,” and it expects more than 50 million netbooks to be in circulation by 2011.

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