Acer plans quad-core $205 8-inch and $239 10-inch tablets powered by MediaTek CPU
By Vlad Bobleanta on 29 Jan 13Acer recently introduced the extremely cheap 7-inch Iconia B1 Android tablet, but the Taiwanese company isn’t planning on stopping its budget device onslaught there. No, it’s going to launch 8″ and 10″ affordable tablets as well, sometime in the near future.
And, just like the B1 before them, these will use chipsets from MediaTek, the company that’s very much used to providing the hardware innards for the cheapest devices to be sold in Asia. MediaTek has recently developed its first ever quad-core processor, the MT6589. This is already slated to appear in a myriad of cheap Chinese smartphones, and it will also be powering Acer’s upcoming tablets (the Iconia B1 uses a dual-core unit).
Acer’s President for Greater China, Linxian Lang, believes that there’s tremendous opportunity in focusing on low-cost tablets. He points out that global tablet shipments this year should go past the 200 million mark. After subtracting Apple and Samsung sales, there’s an addressable market left of around 120 million units this year alone. And those will be almost entirely low-cost devices, where the price per performance ratio delivered is key. So Acer clearly sees a chance to move a high number of devices, and earn money more through big sales numbers than big profits per unit.
The upcoming 8-incher should be priced at NT$6,000 (around $205 at today’s exchange rates – but this will probably be rounded to $199). The 10-inch budget Acer tablet will be sold for NT$7,000 (this amounts to around $239, but could be rounded upward to $249). Those are obviously incredible prices for these size categories, but a quad-core processor alone doesn’t mean they won’t otherwise be low-end. Don’t expect high-resolution screens, for example. Still, at these prices, the lack of high-end specs (aside from the CPU) may simply not matter for most people.
Acer is confident that its best days are ahead of it, and clearly believes in making a big splash in the tablet world with its family of three incredibly cheap models. We’ll have to see how this pans out.
No other specs for the new devices are known just yet, and it’s also unclear when exactly the company will unveil them. But perhaps we could see them showcased in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress in about a month. We’ll keep you posted.
Via China Times
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