Taipei - Taiwan computer giant Acer Inc plans to venture into the mobile phone market with the launch of the Acer Smartphone next month, the company said Saturday. "We will unveil Acer Smartphone at the GSMA Mobile World Congress to be held from February 16-19 in Barcelona," Acer spokesman Wang Tao-hsiung said.
"The reason we are branching into cell phones is that some 300 million units of personal computers are sold in the world each year, but there are 1.5 billion cell phones sold in the world each year," he said.
"Acer wants to tap the middle ground between PCs and cell phones, like mobile internet devices," he said.
Wang stressed that in the short term, the cellular phone would not replace the notebook personal computer, which is Acer's main product.
Notebook PCs account for more than half of Acer's products while the rest are desktop PCs.
Acer reported 2008 revenues of 16.9 billion US dollars, up from 14 billion US dollars the previous year.
