Not to be outdone by Archos and its handful of Android tablets, Acer will also be releasing a few Android tablets as well. Three to be exact, and Acer’s Android tablets will run on Gingerbread, and these will come in sizes of 5, 7, and 10 inches.
It’s cool that companies are working on more than one sized tablet for their customers. Some people may want a 5-inch tablet, especially if they don’t have a smartphone with a large display, or a smartphone at all. Seven inches for a tablet seems to be a very happy medium for portability and functionality, where a 10-inch display on a tablet could be considered for a “power user” who’d like the extra space for viewing movies or whatnot.
With the anticipation of Gingerbread on its way, it’s got to deliver the goods in order to make a tablet more appealing over something like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which is running on Android 2.2 Froyo. The Galaxy Tab will likely be able to receive the Gingerbread update at some point in the future, but what’s to come of the TouchWiz UI that’s been found on all of the Galaxy S phones and the Tab?
If Gingerbread is to make custom skins irrelevant, will manufacturers trash their UI all together? Not all of them, of course, but what would a user think if Samsung was to take off its skin once Gingerbread comes around? It looks like Samsung may need to revamp their custom skin to make sure it plays nice with Gingerbread, which will, in turn, take longer to get the update to the end-user. This could be an advantage for companies like Acer.
If Acer comes out with some untouched, stock Android Gingerbread tablets, not only will they have an advantage over some Froyo-toting tablets, but they will likely be able to upgrade to Honeycomb and other OS upgrades much faster than the others. In this aspect, companies using stock Android will be able to take on fuller-featured tablets by leveraging a higher version of the OS. So, some of the mid-ranged tablets coming about with Gingerbread may actually be more appealing to a tablet that has better specifications, but with a dated version of Android.
There’s not much known about the tablets, but we can also expect to see a Windows 7 tablet from Acer before we get our hands on the Android tablets. Let’s also hope we can see some NVIDA Tegra 2 love on these things as well.
[Via: Phandroid]
