Acer Drops e-reader Plans

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 Posted by Faraz Khan
The Taipei Times has reported that Acer Chairman Wang Jeng-Tang has told reporters Acer’s eReader plans have been put on indefinite hold while the company looks for a way to enter the market with a successful business model, and what it calls a total business solution (one has to assume he is referring to the ecosystem that any eReader needs surrounding the hardware, such as an online bookstore, and increasingly, app store). Im sure they would be having second thoughts after apple entered the market with the iPad.

The decision was made because the eReader market is not that big, and “has yet to reach its full potential” – something I'm sure amazon will not agree with.

This all comes less than a month after the computing giant told Bloomberg that eReaders formed a large part of their strategy this year – a strategy designed to boost the companies net income. Whether after further analysis they decided an eReader wasn’t the right way to go financially, or if they are simply biding their time given the glut or readers hitting the market right now is unclear.

Fellow manufacturers and countrymen Asus show no sign of abating – their DR-570 OLED eReader and 9″ DR-950 are both still apparently on track, so obviously they share none of Acer’s concerns.

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