Today Lite-On IT announced its plans to offer a USB external DVD burner by this year's third quarter. With this new slim-type product Lite-On targets owners of UMPCs, Eee PCs and other portable PCs because they miss a built-in DVD burner and might want to buy an external.

Unknown sources of DigiTimes told the website they see market potential for Lite-On's USB external DVD burner and compared the market with that of external HDDs. For already a few years vendors are selling external hard disk drives and now some might jump in the still young market Lite-On is currently creating.

With big profits in the future and possible adoption by the consumer, we can expect many to step in later.