Acer is preparing two or three tablets to launch in the first half of this year, one of its managers announced on Monday. Acer's long-term goal is to phase out netbooks and replace them with a line of tablet computers, at least one of which will have a seven-inch screen.

Taiwan sales manager Lu Bing-Hsian said that the tablets will run Android OS—though he neglected to say which version—on Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors. The screen sizes will top out at ten inches. Lu also claims the tablets will go where no tablet coming to market has gone before—to a quad-core architecture, which Lu says will make them run faster than laptops running Windows.

More cores will certainly make for better multitasking, a coveted feature on tablets, but we can't imagine this will do much for their battery life. Still, it will be a distinguishing feature for Acer devices among the glut of tablets arriving on the market this year.

Acer's last tablet effort constituted little more than a trip and fall—a 12-inch version priced at under $1,000 that sold less than 300 units a month before being pulled in July. The company's president indicated that this wouldn't be the last we'd see of Acer in the tablet market, though the company made no indication of its interests at the tablet-fest that was CES two weeks ago.

In the meantime, according to Lu, Acer will continue to make simpler netbook models in fewer numbers than recent years until their tablets are ready to take over.