To those who reckoned that netbooks were going to be a feature of computing life for ever and ever: bad news. Acer, the world's second-largest PC maker in 2010, is dumping them.

Instead it plans to start selling "two or three" tablet computers in the first half of this year, according to a company sales manager talking to Computerworld.

"The tablet launches will begin a gradual replacement of Acer's small laptop-style netbook computers, in line with market demands, Taiwan sales manager Lu Bing-hsian said.

"'They are aimed at phasing out netbooks,' he said. 'That's the direction of the market.'"

It will make fewer netbooks, because it sees tablets gaining in popularity. Interestingly, the Acer tablets, running Android, will not be based on ARM chips - as pretty much every other extant Andrdoid tablet is - but instead use Intel Sandy Bridge four-core CPUs. The biggest will have a 10-inch screen.