Acer expected to launch USD 99 tablet next year: Reports

Several reports are doing rounds on the internet, claiming that Acer is working on a budget-friendly Android tablet, unofficially dubbed Acer Iconia B1, which is expected to come with a price tag of USD 99. The company is likely to launch the low-cost tablet early next year.

Also read: Acer Iconia B1 set to be priced at $99 to compete with Nexus 7

If rumours are to be believed, the tablet will feature a 7-inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, and will be powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core processor.

The Wall Street Journal reports says that the tablet will have somewhat similar specs to Amazon's Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Inc Nook Color.

"Acer plans to undercut those best-selling tablets' USD139 price tag by offering the Iconia B1 for around USD99, the person said. The final shelf price will be determined country-by-country," stated the WSJ report.

According to a post on Benchmark.rs, this 7-inch offering from Acer will also come equipped with 512MB of RAM, 8GB of storage, a microSD card slot for storage expansion, GPS and Bluetooth 4.0.

It is believed that the plans for the low-cost tablet began this fall, in response to low-cost tablet offering by rivals.

It is being reported that Acer's low-cost tablet will compete directly with the rumoured budget offering from Asus, which is codenamed ME172V and tipped to be a Nexus tablet.

The Acer Iconia B1-A71 has recently been cleared by the Federal Communications Commission and this tablet is believed to make its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show slated to take place in January 2013.

Besides the Iconia B1 tablet, the company is also rumoured to launch a low-priced version of its Intel-based Windows 8 tablets early next year, but those will not be dirt-cheap offerings.