Jan 18, 2011 10:14 GMT  ·  By

Even though the Pine Trail and Oak trail platforms are the ones most poised to end up at the heart of slates, it seems that Acer is going to deliver some Android tablets built on Sandy Bridge central processing units.

Both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices released their latest sets of processors not long ago, the Sandy Bridge CPUs and the Fusion APUs, respectively.

That said, the past two weeks have been filled with announcements of new desktops, AiOs, notebooks, netbooks and tablets based on them.

Apparently, AMD's APUs, particularly the C-50 and E-350, are doing quite well on the mobile front, unlike the Sunnyvale, California-based company's previous processor lines.

Even more recently, Intel said it would eventually create chips both strong and efficient enough to oust ARM's solutions.

Nevertheless, whatever products are on the way are not here yet, meaning that adopters of Intel's chips have to get creative in order to keep pushing on the x86 tablet front.

Acer figured it would, besides adopt AMD's chips with built-in DirectX 11, come up with tablets that use Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs.

As reported, two or three tablets, with 7-inch to 10-inch displays, are expected to make their appearance during the first half of 2011.

Normally, that they use Intel's latest units wouldn't come as too massive a surprise, but what will be more or less unusual is their OS.

Instead of Windows 7 Starter, Acer's creations will be pre-loaded with a version of Google's Android operating system.

This is unusual because Android has, so far, mostly been found paired with ARM platforms, like Qualcomm's Snapdragon or NVIDIA's Tegra 2.

As for what this entails for entry-level laptops, as it begins to focus on consumer tablets, Acer will supposedly keep making only the simplest of netbook models, at least for the most part.