Acer really surprised the tech crowd last July when it hinted that it was making a gaming tablet, a boast that it made true at IFA last September when it revealed the Predator 8.
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After nearly a week of delays, Acer has now opened up pre-orders for its Predator 8 gaming tablet on Newegg and Acer. The manufacturer is dangling the holy grail of heavy mobile gaming, thanks to an Intel chip, at a dirt cheap price. The Predator 8 has an unusual design that reminds us of Alienware’s laptops, its standout elements being the 4 red font-facing speakers (with surround sound).
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But as an Android tablet, clearly this thing isn’t going to be able to handle Windows PC games (unless you’re using software to stream games from a PC) and the vast majority of Android games are created to run just fine on phones and tablets with mid-range hardware, which kind of makes me wonder if there’s a market for Android tablets aimed at gamers. Which is partly the result of smartphones encroaching on tablet territory, due to the general trend of smartphones increasing in size and creating the newly formed phablet market that we now see today. The tablet has four speakers, which Acer dubs as “Quadio”. The Predator Precision Plus technology gives a bit more sensitivity to the touch screen for better onscreen controls. If you’d like to place a pre-order, Acer is now accepting them via its website where the tablet is priced at a pretty affordable $299.99. If the performance of an Intel Atom x7 for mobile gaming survives a thorough test then it might be worthwhile. That price is for a Wi-Fi model only and Acer has not told us about any 3G/LTE variant.
