According to sources in Taiwan, Acer is said to have begun production of its first premium Android gaming tablet, dubbed the Predator 8. Digitimes Taiwan seems to believe that the tablet will be ready for an international launch by the end of this quarter itself, or at the latest, by Q4, 2015. It was back in April this year, that Acer had announced its Predator range of gaming products, which would include the Predator 8 gaming tab. Back then, the company had indicated a tentative ETA of September for the device. Even though Acer doesn’t expect the tablet to bring in volumes, the Taiwanese company seems to be looking at raising awareness about its Android offerings, which currently include the ‘Liquid’ range of smartphones.
While the tablet market has been seeing a downturn over the past few quarters, Acer seems to believe that targeted, niche segments within the sector still holds enough appeal for buyers. Digitimes meanwhile says that its research has indicated the tablet market will suffer further contraction this year, with a de-growth of as much as 10 percent YoY in the calendar year 2015. As for Android gaming tablets, Nvidia’s Shield was originally launched in 2013, but had limited success. The company, best known for its ‘GeForce’ range of desktop graphics processors, reportedly plans to launch its next generation Shield tablet by the end of this year.
Coming to the Predator 8, the gaming tablet was showed off by Acer at the Computex trade fair held earlier this year in Taiwan, giving us an initial look at what the tablet might be like once it gets a commercial launch. The device is said to come with an 8-inch display (and hence the ‘8’ in its name) of unknown resolution, and will be powered by an Intel chip. While Acer didn’t reveal exactly which chipset will be found inside the Predator 8, Intel ended up revealing that its 64-bit Atom X7 chip will be powering the device. To be precise, the exact CPU will be the X7-Z8700, which is a quad-core chip clocked at a maximum of 2.4 GHz, with a base frequency of 1.6 GHz. The CPU comes with 2 MB of cache, and has integrated Intel HD Graphics clocked at up to 600 MHz. Not much else is known about the device as of now, but as we get closer to the launch, hopefully, there will be more revelations to come.