Acer's Predator gaming tablet goes head to head with NVIDIA's Android powered Shield

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Taiwanese PC and laptop manufacturer Acer will be branching out to the gaming tablet market, which is suffering from lack of sales due to the rise of large screen smartphones. Currently, the only other company to have released a product specifically for that market was NVIDIA, with its Android Shield. Acer will be attempting to take on NVIDIA's gaming tablet with its Predator one. The product was spotted by Pocket-Lint at Acer's annual global press conference.

During the conference, the company's CEO, Jason Chen had made several announcements and while he did not care to mention the hardware specifications that would comprise of the Predator tablet, he did manage to state that it will appear in Q3, omitting which year it would be released in. One of the drawbacks of owning a gaming tablet is that since it possesses a touch interface, it is unable to provide gamers with a tactile feeling that keyboards and gaming controllers are able to deliver.

However, one of the primary differences between Acer's Predator tablet and NVIDIA's Android Shield gaming slate will be that the former will deliver a similar vibration experienced from a PlayStation or Xbox controller. Additionally, the tablet possesses aesthetics of an actual gaming product, with a black and red color combination supplementing its overall looks.

Furthermore, dual cameras, a micro-USB charging port and a 3.5 mm headphone jack will also be provided. The dummy version present at the conference possessed an 8 inch screen size. There is a high level of doubt that Acer's Predator will possess NVIDIA's Tegra X1 SoC, since the company will be in direct competition with the leading manufacturer of graphics processors.

Instead, Acer might look forward to incorporating MediaTek's Helio X20 SoC, which features a 10-core processor or Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820, which will be fabricated on Samsung's superior 14 nm FinFET process. Since hardware details of Predator are currently unavailable, the actual information can only be presented once the gaming slate near its official launch date.