Mar 11, 2011 11:02 GMT  ·  By

With all the more or less unexpected changes on the PC market over the past year, especially in regards to the mobile segment, Acer was forced to do the same as others and enter the tablet segment, a move that, apparently, is paying off.

Back in early 2010, Acer was one of the most skeptical companies when it came to tablets and their potential to endanger netbooks.

Sure enough, once the slate form factor proved both a good seller and a threat to low-end laptops, Acer had to start on tablets of its own.

Granted, it still wasn't able to escape the fallout that declining netbook shipments brought about.

After losing the second highest position as worldwide PC maker to Dell in the second quarter of last year, the gap between them only increased, especially in Q4.

The entry-level laptop market, thus, is no longer really expected to grow that much, if at all, as the part of rapidly-evolving new market segment has not been passed to the tablet.

Fortunately, for the Taiwanese company at least, its efforts in this field seem to actually be paying off, or so says a recent report from Digitimes.

Apparently, at least as far as Taiwan goes, some telecom carriers will reduce their netbook purchasing in order to order more slates.

This will end up with flat Acer netbook sales, although the other sort of device should flourish, or so the outfit hopes.

Acer will deliver slates running the Android 3.0 operating system sometime this month or in April, 2011. What's more, demand for such items is supposedly very strong.

Overall, Acer aims to ship over 400,000 units in its home market alone, although it still has to carry out a survey, to see just what price point it should look for, preferably before the Apple iPad 2 makes it to Taiwan.