Acer said its first Android phone, called Liquid, is exceeding sales expectations, and the smartphone greenhorn sounded a bullish note for its prospects in the coming year.
"Liquid is doing much better than our expectation," Acer President Gianfranco Lanci told Bloomberg in an interview. "This is why we're a little bit short of supply." The company released the Liquid in December in Asian markets, and European operators are expected to begin selling the device this quarter. The phone has a 3.5-inch touchscreen, a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 5-megapixel camera. The executive said Acer expects to ship 250,000 Liquid units this quarter, up from previous estimates of between 150,000 and 200,000.
Lanci said the company expects to sell between 2 and 3 million smartphones this year running both Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS and Android. Previous repors had pegged Acer's smartphone sales expectations at around 2 million units.
Acer joins Dell and Garmin as a relative newcomer to the smartphone market--a market poised to tighten further as traditional OEMs such as Samsung and LG step up their own smartphone efforts.
For more:
- see this Bloomberg article
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