Acer planning to launch $99 Android tablet

PanARMENIAN.Net - Acer Inc. is planning to launch an Android tablet priced around US$99 early next year, The Wall Street Journal reports citing a person with direct knowledge of the project.

The world’s fourth-largest PC maker by shipments hopes to be the first big-brand company to launch a tablet priced to jostle with Chinese white-box tablet makers for consumers in developing countries.

At seven inches with a 1024 x 600 resolution screen and 1.2GHz dual-core processor, the so-called Iconia B1 tablet will have somewhat similar specs to Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color. But Acer plans to undercut those best-selling tablets’ $139 price tag by offering the Iconia B1 for around $99, the person said. The final shelf price will be determined country-by-country, The Journal says.

The tablet is aimed at emerging markets. While the device has been submitted to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for clearance, it’s uncertain whether it will actually be sold stateside.

Plans for the low-cost tablet began hastily this fall, in response to aggressively priced offering by competitors, the person said. It marks a strategy tilt for Taipei-based Acer, which has been working most of this year to boost its profit margins with high-end products.

“In the past few months, we’ve made project roadmap changes in response to big changes in the tablet market,” the person said. “The launch of the Nexus 10 (made by Google and Samsung Electronics Co. with a US$399 starting price) has changed the outlook for what makes competitive pricing.”

The blue-edged Acer Iconia B1′s pictures surfaced this month on a Serbian forum. They were confirmed as authentic by a person familiar with the project and also comes partly as a response to Acer’s crosstown rival Asustek Computer Inc., which has been rumored to be brewing up a similarly low-priced Android tablet for next year, the person said.

Asustek spokesman David Chang said the company is not making a $100 tablet and declined to comment further on its product pipeline, according to The Journal.

Aside from the Iconia B1, another person with direct knowledge of Acer’s tablet products said the company is also planning to launch a low-priced version of its Intel-based Windows 8 tablets early next year, as its current ones are “too pricey.”

Acer’s pursuit of lower-priced tablets will cut into its margins, but will help it secure a stronger foothold in the rapidly growing China market, said Daiwa Securities analyst Christine Wang.

“Chinese white-box tablet makers are expected to sell some 60 million tablets next year, so it is a really big market,” she said. “None of the major PC brands sells a tablet right now priced to compete with them right now.”

The 7-inch tablet market has been getting increasingly crowded this year, with Apple Inc. launching the $329 iPad Mini and Google partnering with Asustek on the $199 Nexus 7 to challenge Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s popular devices of that size.

Acer slipped out of the top five tablet makers in the third quarter, with its share of global shipments below 1.4%, according to IDC.