subject: Netbook King Acer Put more Focus on the Quality Tablets [print this page] Netbook King Acer Put more Focus on the Quality Tablets
With the launch of its A500 tablet, Acer reveals big plans. It's shedding its volume-over-value mission that served it so well in the netbook game, and aiming at quality.
Acer said nothing about its A500 Iconia Tab back in January at CES, but gave away almost nothing about it. Today we know it's going on pre-order from April 14th at $449.99, and it's a 10.1-inch touchscreen tablet pc running a dual-core 1 GHz Nvidia Tegra 250 CPU, with a 1,280 by 800 pixel display, 1GB of RAM and twin cameras. It has an aluminum chassis, and has Wi-Fi but no 3G powers.
Most interestingly of all it's only the second tablet, after the Motorola Xoom, to feature Android tablet 3.0 Honeycomb as its OS. This is the self-same code that has been the subject of speculation recently--with Google seeming to keep it corralled and protected until exec Andy Rubin stepped forward to say Google wasn't protecting the OS at all. Honeycomb is Google's effort at competing with the iPad on equal footing with Apple's iOS code, which has been optimized for both devices, since until version 3.0 Android was centered around the way smartphones operate. The Xoom was touted as the first serious challenger to the iPad so we can imagine that the A500 may earn some of the same sort of attention.
Acer's chairman and CEO JT Wang faced questions about the future of the company and revealed a good piece of news, probably born of the recent executive reshuffle. Instead of concentrating on volume shipments of low-margin products to earn profits, Acer will be changing tack in the future toward shipping products that deliver more value to consumers and that consumers actually need. This is a marked change from the approach that Acer used during the netbook boom to capture the lion's share of the market.
The plan highlights that Acer is actually trying to be flexible to a changing market space, despite its size, and now that the short-lived netbook boom is all but over and the era of the tablet has arrived (although Wang cautioned it would be a slower transition than some people think). Acer could be planning a big assault on the Android and Windows-powered tablets--with some serious hardware, instead of aiming at the cheap end.
