Acer Unveils 7-inch Android Tablet, 6-inch E-book Reader, ‘Stream’ Phone

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Looks like Acer has jumped into both the e-book reader and Android tablet arenas with the announcement of its 6-inch LumiRead and an unnamed 7-inch Android tablet.

The LumiRead e-book reader has a QWERTY keyboard similar to Amazon’s Kindle, 2GB of onboard storage expandable via microSD cards, both Wi-Fi and 3G, and book downloads from Barnes & Noble’s e-book store. There are a couple of other neat tricks, too, most notably an ISBN scanner “so you can create your own wish-list and search on supported online libraries and book stores” and DLNA networking capabilities, allowing you to share content between other DLNA-connected devices.

acerlumiread

No word on pricing yet, and there’s just a loose release timeframe of Q4.

As for the 7-inch Android tablet, it’ll be available in Q4 as well although actual details about the device are pretty scant at the moment. According to Shufflegazine, the tablet looked similar to the LumiRead e-book reader but had a color touchscreen. So imagine the device in the above photo with a slightly larger color screen. The built-in keyboard ought to please some people. Here’s more from Shufflegazine:

“[Acer CEO Gianfranco] Lanci showed off a 7-inch tablet running Android. We weren’t given much more information than that other than he said it had color screen (which we could also see obviously) and would arrive in Q4. Price was not yet determined and in talking about how they would go to market with it, he said they had not decided between traditional channels or operators. He said that operators were an “obvious” option, hinting at the tablet having a 3G connection, something he didn’t confirm.”

Acer’s known to price its products pretty aggressively, so we can probably expect something more on the affordable end of the spectrum. Of course by Q4, it’s going to be Tablet City around here as everyone who’s anyone in the computer business gets some sort of tablet to market.

Shufflegazine via Engadget

And finally, the company also announced the Acer Stream, a 0.44-inch thin Android smartphone with a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, 3.7-inch 800×480 AMOLED touchscreen, 3G/HSDPA/Bluetooth/GPS/Wi-Fi connectivity, 512MB of RAM, and 2GB of built-in storage expandable up to 32GB via microSD.

No word on pricing or availability quite yet, although AndroidCommunity.com says “it was spotted earlier this week clearing the FCC. That certainly suggests a US launch.”

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