Acer joins field for battle of the tablets

THERE is a new size in town. Just when it appeared that the tablet wars would come down to a battle between Apple and Samsung on the one hand, and between the 10-inch (25cm) and 7-inch format on the other, an interloper has emerged, in the form of the 8-inch format.

To no one’s utter surprise, Apple was first out of that size box with the iPad mini at the end of last year. It was even less surprising when, in February this year, Samsung revealed the Galaxy Note 8.0 to plug one of the few holes in its wide array of formats. It looked like a carbon copy of the mini — no surprise there, either — but had enhanced weaponry, such as the S-Pen to write on the screen and expandable memory.

The format has immense appeal. The 8-inch number alone does little justice to how much more portable it is than 10-inch tablets. It is much

Price may well turn out to be its secret for success

lighter and easily slips into a handbag or side sleeve of a laptop bag. More crucially, the screen is almost an exact match for the standard size of a paperback book, making this the first tablet format that could give e-readers a natural-reading run for their digital money.

Compared to 7-inch tablets, the difference is surprisingly large. The makeuseof.com website calculated the difference through the “mathematics of display size” and found that an 8-inch display provided 27.5 square inches of screen real estate, compared with 21 square inches for a 7-inch screen. That is a startling 16.5cm² from what appears to be a mere 2.5cm increment.

The biggest surprise of all is that more manufacturers have not cottoned on to this format. Only one other major brand has so far made a serious play for the 8-inch market. At the Computex fair in June, Acer launched the Iconia W3, the first 8-inch tablet running Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system. It turned out to be a dud, partly because Windows 8 was designed for larger screens and partly because of a poor display quality. Low screen resolution also meant that side-by-side multitasking — one of the core strengths of Windows 8 — was disabled.

But the Taiwanese company bounced back immediately with the Iconia A1, an 8-inch tablet running the Android operating system. Launched in South Africa last week, the A1 also bears a passing resemblance to the iPad mini. Like the Note, it differentiates itself with an expandable memory slot. This does not mean only that an 8GB model can be expanded to store 40MB of data, but also that its contents can easily be swapped between devices.

Even though Apple has yet to learn that obvious and much demanded trick, however, the challenge for Acer will be to convince the market that it is a viable alternative. The iPad mini sold about 75 000 units in South Africa in the first six months of this year; the newer Samsung Note 8.0 moved about 23 000 units in the last quarter. Acer hopes to sell an initial 15 000 Iconia A1s in the next three months.

Clearly, the device does not have its rivals quaking in their boot-ups. It carries a similar screen to the W3 and will have to compete aggressively on price. The latter may well turn out to be its secret for success.

Its R3 500 price tag is equivalent to that of the iPad mini, but half that of the Note 8.0. This makes it a viable device for consumers and business users who want an Android tablet — particularly if they already have an Android smartphone, which outsells Apple iPhones by more than three to one in South Africa.

Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee