An Acer sales manager tells Computer World that the company is planning to build a few new Android tablets this year including 7 and 10 inch models with Intel Sandy Bridge processors. The story also says the company will be scaling back its netbook plans in favor of tablets.

According to Computer World, the tablets will have four-core processors and run “faster than laptops with Windows.”

Of course, Sandy Bridge processors are much more powerful than the ARM-based chips favored by most Android tablet makers, and since Android is designed to run on those low power chips, it makes sense that an Android tablet would appear faster than a Windows machine, at least in terms of the amount of time it takes to boot, suspend, launch programs, and perform many other tasks.

I’m not entirely convinced this will make the machines “faster,” per se, but the article is pretty light on details. There’s also no mention of how using x86 chips instead of ARM-based chips will affect the battery life of these tablets.

Honestly, I’m taking the whole report with a grain of salt for now. But I have to admit that I’m intrigued by the idea of Sandy Bridge powered Android tablets.

Update: Acer says it’s not phasing out netbooks and there are currently no plans to introduce a Sandy Bridge-powered tablet.

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3 replies on “Acer prepping Android tablets with Sandy Bridge CPUs, scaling back netbooks?”

  1. That’s too bad. Just when these netbooks started looking useful with dual cores and all the other new hardware, companies begin replacing them with even less useful tablets.

    1. Just because they are scaling back doesn’t mean they are replacing netbooks. The Netbook market is just not rapidly growing like it use to, which is to be expect when a product reaches market saturation and people start shifting focus from getting the device to being equally or more concerned about upgrading and/or replacing it.

      But there are still new things like AMD Fusion giving us alternatives to traditional Intel ATOM netbooks and Intel will eventually update the present Pine Trail Atoms to Cedar Trail before the end of this year.

      Tablets are just part of the rapidly growing mobile market but eventually all devices reach market saturation and slow down. So it’s just tablets turn to shine as the new big thing.

      Form factors for mobile devices are still evolving though and we’ve yet to see which form factor will ultimately dominate.

  2. Perhaps they are readying dual-boot Windows and Android systems, like they have done in the past sometimes.

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