Acer Iconia Tab A500
The folks at DigiTimes have a habit of digging up unofficial news about upcoming gadgets by talking to parts suppliers in Taiwan. Today the web site has two major scoops, one about Acer and the other about Toshiba — although neither story has been confirmed.
Acer is reportedly planning to offer a tablet with an Intel Atom Oak Trail processor and Google Android Honeycomb operating system by July. We’ve already heard that Intel is pushing the Oak Trail platform as an alternative to ARM-based chips for Android tablets, so this doesn’t come as a huge surprise. DigiTimes reports that Lenovo and Asus are expected to launch similar devices soon.
Acer is also apparently looking at the possibility of a tablet running the latest MeeGo Linux operating system.
DigiTimes also reports that Toshiba is killing plans for two products: A Windows 7 tablet PC and a Google Chromebook laptop. The funny part of this rumor is that Toshiba is reportedly staying away from Chromebooks because the company didn’t have much success in the similar “smartbook” space. But as far as I can tell, the only smartbook Toshiba ever launched was the Toshiba AC-100 which was never even released in most markets. It’s hard to sell a product if it’s not widely available.
“It’s hard to sell a product if it’s not widely available”
Much the same strategy as that used to kill off Linux and SSD netbooks, still the perfect combination but more or less completely unavailable.