Acer Plans Win 7 AMD Z-Series Slates After Ice Cream Sandwich Wait

Acer and a bunch of the other companies are getting ready to toss tablets out onto the market in force. You can bet that a bunch of those tablets will be packing Android as the OS but there will be a good number of Windows 7 tablets as well. I suspect that the Windows 7 tablets will be more appealing to the business user than the average consumer, but time will tell. Acer has used AMD processors in Windows 7 tablets before with the W500.

DigiTimes reports that Acer has just placed a big order for AMD Z series APUs for its tablet lineup. The order is reportedly for 80,000 of those processors. The tablet PCs are reportedly going to target the enterprise market. Considering that Android Ice Cream Sandwich is not due to later in the year and the enterprise focus of the tablets Acer is cooking up and Windows 7 rigs with Z series APUs look to be on the horizon. MSI is also said to be developing a tablet using the Z Series processors.

We will likely see more firms look to Windows 7 for tablets that are coming to market while waiting for Ice Cream Sandwich to land with the unresolved issues that are hovering around Honeycomb. DigiTimes reports that the Z series APUs are being eyed by tablet makes because the Oak Trial platform from Intel that competes with it is more expensive and slurps more power making batteries in the typically compact tablets offer less run time. The AMD APU was confirmed as the chip for the Z series tablets earlier this month.

[via DigiTimes]