Acer's cheap 7-inch Android tablet hints at wave of devices for Q3

At Computex 2012, Acer quietly showed off an update to its 7 inch Android-powered Iconia A100 Tab which is expected to come out in the third quarter of the year.

The new tablet is known as the A110, features a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor with 1 GB of RAM, and will run Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich.

The noteworthy thing about this device is that it will reportedly be priced under $200, which hints that it could be the first beneficiary of the Nvidia Kai reference platform for tablets. Kai was first revealed to Nvidia investors in May, and it showed Nvidia's interest in providing tablet manufacturers with a cost-effective hardware solution for $199 tablets.

"Does KAI make sacrifices? Sure it does. It has to. But it makes these sacrifices in the right places, with many options for our partners to deliver the right solution to the market for consumers," last week, Tegra marketing director Matt Wuebbling wrote in the Nvidia blog. Wuebbling said Kai-based devices are coming soon, but still none have been announced. Acer did not say whether the Iconia A110 is actually based upon this platform or not.

However, Acer is longtime supporter of Nvidia's Tegra platforms, and has typically been one of the first out of the gate with Nvidia-powered hardware. Furthermore, the competitive landscape in Android tablets has shifted somewhat, and manufacturers are looking to provide competition for Amazon's Kindle Fire with their own 7", low-cost devices. If Acer launches the A110 in the third quarter, that will likely be the time when other manufacturers come out with Kai-based tablets of their own, the most noteworthy of which being Google/Motorola.