Acer’s Apple app store
Jim Wong, Acer’s IT Products president, today revealed that Apple and the company will develop its own App store. The portal will cover all of Acer’s devices and include not just mobile platforms like Android and Windows Mobile, but also desktop platforms like Windows and eventually Chrome OS. Its initial catalog will range into the “hundreds”, but will skew towards low cost or even free titles.
The measure would allow Acer to collect fees from application downloads, though it is unclear how the company plans to differentiate its efforts from Android Market and Windows Marketplace for Mobile, both of which are standard features of their respective platforms.
Jim Wong also admits to BusinessWeek that Acer has been developing a tablet, but that the company is keeping an eye on Apple’s plans. The choice of operating system is still agnostic for the moment and could use a Windows platform from Google or more. Many companies at CES were showing Android-based tablets.
An e-reader is in development that should be shown by the end of Jun. It should be a conventional design with a 6-inch grayscale e-paper display. Ship initially for up to five European countries.
Additional benefits that the company’s already confirmed Chrome OS netbook plans are on track and could have a system ready as soon as the summer. It is not known if the computer will run on ARM- or Intel-based architectures, though Chrome OS has so far been demonstrated running on Intel Atom processors.
