Acer to follow Apple’s example and have its own app store; e-reader possible
31st January, 2010 by Adina
Tags: Acer, Apple, e-Reades, News
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Jim Wong, IT Products president at Acer, has revealed that the company will follow Apple’s example and will develop its own applications store. The portal is meant to include mobile platforms like Windows Mobile and Android and also desktop platforms, such as Windows or Chrome OS. The initial catalog, ranging into the “hundreds”, will soon direct towards low-cost titles or even free ones.
This move would allow Acer collect royalties from application downloads. It’s not obvious, however, how Acer will differentiate its efforts from Windows Marketplace for Mobile and Android Market, both of them being standard features of the respective platforms.
Wong also says that Acer is developing a tablet but also keeps an eye on what Apple is doing. The operating system is not yet decided, but could be a Google platform or a Windows one. The recent CES has shown many companies presenting Android-based tablets.
The end of June could bring an e-reader developed by Acer. The device should be conventionally designed and should have a 6-inch grayscale e-paper display. The e-reader would initially be shipped in five European countries.
Wong also added that Acer already confirmed Chrome OS for its netbook plans and a system could be ready by this summer. A decision was not made whether the computer would run on ARM or Intel architectures. However, Chrome OS has been running on Intel Atom processors so far.
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I have some advice for Acer. Forget old technology. Forget gray-scale screens. Forget Windows for tablets.
The only way to make a tablet that can compete against the iPad, is to make it on an ARM processor, with a color screen, and using Google’s Android OS. If any one of those three factors are changed, the unit will not succeed.
They need the ARM processor for energy efficiency. They need to use Android because it’s already popular, with lots of applications (Windows Mobile is unpopular, and app developers have abandoned it). Gray-scale screens should not even be considered. Nobody would make a black & white television. Modern screen technology (such as Pixel Qi) can combine color and ambient lighting for power efficiency. The single-purpose ebook reader is dead, and only multi-function devices (similar to iPad) will survive.