Acer’s Upcoming Tablets, Smartphone: A Visual Tour

Once reluctant to enter the tablet game, Acer’s coming out firing with details on new Android and Windows tablets, along with an oversized smartphone. Here’s a closer look at the upcoming touch screen products, all due in the early part of next year.

For a report from the New York City press event where Acer announced its new products follow this link.

Like Toshiba’s Libretto W100, the Acer Iconia is a “concept” laptop with two touch screens, but it’s much larger, with each 1366-by-768 resolution screen measuring 14 inches. The Iconia will have an Intel Core i5 processor, integrated Intel graphics, up to 4GB of RAM, up to 750GB of storage and a measly three hours of battery life. It’ll launch in February 2011 for an unknown price.

Acer plans to add lots of custom software on top of Windows 7, including touch-based photo, video and music browsers, a social media reader and a virtual scrapbook for storing Website clippings and taking notes. Central to the software element is the “Ring,” a navigation menu that pops up when you place five fingers on the screen. Typing’s going to be a royal pain, though.

Acer plans to launch a 10-inch Windows 7 tablet in February. For tech specs, we only know that the tablet runs on an AMD processor and has built-in 3G and Wi-Fi. It measures 0.59-inches thick and weighs “less than 1kg,” or 2.2 pounds).

The best part about Acer’s 10.1-inch Windows tablet is the included keyboard docking station, essentially turning it into a detachable laptop. However, I don’t see any USB inputs for a mouse, which might alleviate the dreaded gorilla arm when docked.

Acer’s pushing the boundaries of acceptable smartphone size with a 4.8-inch screen and 21:9 aspect ratio. And unlike Dell’s Streak, which would could never quite commit to a product category, Acer cheerily calls this device a “smartphone with the soul of a tablet.” Resolution is 1024-by-480, and there’s an 8-megapixel camera with flash, but no front-facing camera. Flash 10.1 will be supported. Other specs, pricing and release date are unknown.

Acer’s taking no chances with both 7-inch and 10.1-inch Android tablets, coming April 2011. The smaller version is notable for beating Samsung’s Galaxy Tab on resolution with a 1280-by-800 display. It also has a dual-core processor, front-facing HD camera and Flash 10.1 support. The larger tablet uses Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor and offers 1080p video and “complex 3D games.” Both models support 3G, Wi-Fi and HDMI output. No word on price.

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