PC vendor Acer Inc (宏碁) said on Tuesday it had won an order to supply a local restaurant chain with tablets that diners can use to order food.
The restaurant chain is to buy about 1,000 to 2,000 of Acer’s 7-inch Android tablets, said Samuel Chang (張世欣), director of the marketing division of Acer’s Taiwan regional operation.
However, Chang declined to name the business.
Starting next month, customers at the chain’s 20 to 30 restaurants around the country will be able to use the tablets to place their food orders, Chang said.
“It seems like many enterprises have started thinking about how their salespersons can adopt more portable solutions,” he said at the launch of Acer’s new 8-inch tablet, which retails for NT$7,490 (US$249).
Chang said that while Acer is discussing other commercial projects, Taiwan’s consumer market remains the company’s main target for its tablet products in the second half of the year.
The company has forecast a 40 percent quarterly growth for domestic sales this quarter, including laptops, desktop computers, 2-in-1 hybrid devices, tablet PCs, smartphones, monitors, projectors and servers, Chang said.
On July 3, Acer teamed up with two leading sales agents in Taiwan — Synnex Technology International Corp (聯強) and Weblink International Inc (展碁) — to market its eight major product lines.
Acer said the cooperation would expand its sales network in the country to a total of about 5,000 distributors and thus reach millions more domestic consumers and more than 1 million local businesses.
Meanwhile, HTC Corp (宏達電) on Tuesday declined to comment on a foreign media report that it is working on two more tablet computers in addition to its anticipated 9-inch premium device in cooperation with Google Inc.
Tech news site BGR cited a Twitter post from famous leaker “@evleaks” as reporting on Monday that besides the Nexus 9, HTC might also launch tablets codenamed “T7” and “T12.”
The report did not reveal further details.
The HTC-Google Nexus 9 is expected to go on sale in this fall, priced from around US$399.
It will feature a 2K display, a 64-bit processor, 2GB of RAM, up to 32GB of storage, an 8-megapixel camera with optical image stabilization and the latest Android L operating system, the report said.
HTC declined to comment on the new products, but suggested that it might return to the tablet market at some point.
“We can’t comment on the details of our roadmap, but we have previously confirmed that we continue to watch the tablet market with interest and will only introduce a new product to any category if we feel we can offer real improvements over the current competitors,” HTC said in an e-mail.
HTC, which manufactured Google’s first Nexus smartphone in 2010, has launched only two tablets of its own in the past, but they have proved unpopular due to their relatively high costs.
The HTC Flyer was unveiled in April 2011, priced at US$499, while the 4G LTE-enabled HTC Jetstream was launched in September that year at US$849.
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