Acer is scaling back its expectations for tablet and notebook shipments this year. The Wall Street Journal reports that the world’s second largest PC maker (behind HP) has slashed its estimates for tablet shipments by more than half, with hopes of shipping 2.5 million to 3 million tablets this year.
Notebook shipments are also expected to drop this year. DigiTimes reports that Acer’s netbook shipments in May were 50 percent lower than in April.
There are a number of factors at play here. First, the economy is still shaky, which has a lot of people thinking twice before plunking down cash on a new computer — or a whole new class of device that they’re not sure they need such as an Android tablet.
But more importantly, while every major consumer electronics company is trying to compete with Apple in the tablet space, the iPad is still the only real runaway success story so far. Not only does a company like Acer have to compete with Apple for mindshare, but Acer is also competing with Samsung, Asus, HTC, Toshiba, and a number of other companies that have brought similar Android tablets to market.
No the biggest factor is that acer have come out with nothing special at all! A huge disappointment. The W500 win 7 slate could have been a winner but the design was just simply poor. The android slates are just nothing in comparison with the ones from say Asus.Â
What is the difference? Same hardware internals.