Acer has been working on a line of tablets for a while. There’s no surprise there. But now it looks like the company is finally getting ready to launch its tablets. The Wall Street Journal reports that Acer will hold an event in New York on November 23rd to introduce a new line of tablets with prices ranging from $299 to $699.
There’s no official word on the size, operating system, or other specs, but we’ve seen rumors suggesting that Acer will have 5, 7, and 10 inch Android tablets with ARM-based chips from Qualcomm or NVIDIA.
An earlier rumor suggested Acer was working on just two models: a 7 inch tablet and a 10 inch device. We also saw a concept device this summer that Acer was describing as an eBook Reader, but which looked an awful lot like a 7 inch tablet.
It’s possible all these leaks and rumors are wrong… but I suspect that what we’ll see on November 23rd is some sort of Android tablet… or two… or three. Whether they’ll go on sale by year’s end still remains to be seen.
Of course, these won’t be the first tablet-style devices Acer has launched. The company has also been offering a convertible tablet-style laptop running Windows 7 called the Acer Aspire 1825PTZ in some markets since earlier this year. But the Android tablets are expected to be smaller, lighter, and cheaper.
via Engadget
It seem as though these slates (form factor) are not tablets (usage scenario). Moreover, I don’t think that these deserve to be called “tablet PCs” as suggested by the headline. The autonomy implied by the term Personal Computer is definitely not something that an operating system like Android, especially when combined with Google marketplace, seeks to preserve. In fact, it seeks to undermine it. These are definitively connected devices.
Terms, especially marketing created ones related to gadgets and technology, change definitions all the time. Like those super computers back in the olden days where they just did simple math calculations are called calculators today.
A touch screen based device running Android is the same as a touch screen device running Windows except it’s more gimped in features. Both are tablet PCs, slates, computers, etc. These terms are just created by marketing departments and apparently you’re just sticking to the definition a company told you years ago. It’s like Apple users saying their computers aren’t PCs.