Acer Targets Android Netbooks for Late Summer

The first Aspire with Android should appear on the market in the third quarter of 2009. More than that Acer Inc. won't reveal, say, as to pricing or launch locations. But at a Computex Taipei press conference, it did slip out that Intel's Atom platform would be the hardware basis of choice.

Acer plans for Android to be the future alternative to Windows for most of its new netbooks. The Acer Group, which was formed in 1976 as Multitech in Taiwan, is optimistic about the market force of the open source Google platform. "Acer believes the Android operating system will contribute significantly to the worldwide netbook market growth," they said in their press release, "Acer announces Android netbook."

Android opened its eyes to the world in November 2007 and has been steadily conquering the mobile market ever since. Android netbooks have been appearing just more recently, the new Skytone out of China as an example. Among manufacturers lately joining the Android bandwagon are MIPS Technologies, Nvidia, and Wind River for Qualcomm's Snapdragon and devices for Kyocera Wireless (see recent news about Wind River).

The larger market, however, has been in mobile phones. Along with Nokia's Symbian Foundation of mobile network device collaborators and the LiPS-and-LiMO consortium of mobile phone giants, the Open Handset Alliance and HTC (with its various partnerships) have been contributing to bringing Android to the mass market. As an example, T-Mobile is expecting its next G1 release in early summer.