Branching out – the future of Acer with Andrew Hou, Jerry Kao, Victor Chien

It’s been a while since the Next@Acer 2020 presentation, where refreshes for popular models were revealed for the modern consumer, as well as… an energy drink in the Predator Shot? It does make sense though, for Acer to want to branch out to more than just laptops and desktops for gamers, so that they can continue to be competitive in the tech market as a whole. In brief, we get thoughts from Andrew Hou, President of Acer, Jerry Kao, President, IT Products Business of Acer, and Victor Chien, President Digital Display Business of Acer.

We needed to know about the whole energy drinks thing. Hou tells us they’ve been partners with Red Bull for many years, so they already  know there’s quite the market for it. The question about having their own drink brand, especially with Predator League and being involved in many different tournaments, has been banded about. Energy drinks are pretty common sponsors at these events, after all, and it would seem that now is a good time to finally enter another industry with Predator being a ubiquitous name now with their own gaming products and events.

They’ll be looking for different opportunities to make the Predator Shot more widely available, starting with gaming events as a natural starting point. It won’t just be confined to gaming events – just imagine Predator Shot being sold side by side with other energy drinks.

The Predator Helios and Triton have yet to utilize AMD Ryzen processors, but Predator is looking for the best performance for their class for the brand. They do acknowledge that AMD and Intel are pretty close in gaming performance, so they’ll be keen to see how the next generation of their processors turn out and decide.

You might have also heard of the Osim New Predator gaming chair, which is basically a massage chair. They’re working closely with Osim right now, and Kao confirms Malaysia and Indonesia will be the regions included in the launching wave. The chair will begin shipping out in August, though exact details about marketing and promotion still need to be ironed out, as well as its launch date.

Wireless gaming displays may be the next biggest thing, and Acer has had wireless displays before, just not for gaming yet. Acer does not have plans to provide wireless gaming displays just yet, as they want full HD resolution displays and push it up to 360Hz. Such requirements would need a lot of bandwidth, and Chien doesn’t yet believe the current wireless technology can provide the best gaming experience for users, hence their focus on current gaming display technology. Should the wireless tech keep up with the demands of users, then they will definitely look to provide solutions.

Besides providing higher frame rate and better display resolution, they’re now also moving to focus on colour sense and adaptive light technology to optimize the screen’s lighting performance, to help reduce a user’s eyestrain. Chien posits that vision care technology will be the next trend for gaming displays.

We’ll just have to keep an eye out to what Acer might surprise us with. For now, we have the product refreshes, and something a bit more unusual in Predator Shot, and the New Predator chair. We say unusual, but they seem like pretty natural segues into extensions of markets Acer are already involved in when you think about it. What would Acer make headway into next?

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