Acer chief hints at low-cost, quad-core slates later this year

Acer has been making some noise in the budget tablet market with their Iconia B1, a $150 slate designed to go toe-to-toe with Google’s popular Nexus 7. It appears that prospect may be panning out as Acer CEO Linxian Lang recently spoke with the China Times about expanding their lineup to include more sizes and price points.

According to the executive, Acer will have low-cost tablets available later this year in 8-inch and 10-inch varieties. The slates would be priced between 150 to 175 euros, or roughly $200 to $235.

Normally we don’t get too excited about low-end tablets but Lang pointed out that these slates would include quad-core processors. Systems packing that kind of power could certainly compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD and the Nexus 7, at least on paper. Acer said they expect to ship 200 million tablets this year with the majority being low-end and mainstream offerings.

The Iconia B1 we spoke of earlier includes a dual-core 1.2GHz processor and 512MB of RAM crammed behind a 7-inch WSVGA touchscreen operating at 1,024 x 600. The slate runs Android Jelly Bean and has a microSD card slot, 2,710mAh battery, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS.

There’s no indication of when or if we may see these Acer slates arrive on US shores. The Iconia B1 isn’t planned to be released stateside and at least one other publication doesn’t believe we will see either of these new tablets in the US either.