Acer plans to launch a $99 Android tablet in the new year to compete with the off-brand Chinese products in developing countries, Wall Street Journal reported. Citing an unnamed source, the report said the tablet, named Iconia B1, will feature a seven-inch display with a 1024 x 600 resolution screen and 1.2GHz dual-core processor.

Iconia B1 is expected to come with similar features such as the Barnes & Noble's Nook Color and Amazon's Kindle Fire. Although the final price will be decided country-by-country, the $99 tablet will undercut the $139 price tag of the aforementioned best-selling tablets, the source said.

However, it is not very clear at this point in time whether the cheap tablet will see a wider release in US as it is under the consideration of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for clearance currently. The tablet is developed for the emerging markets.

The source said that Acer began working on the low-cost tablet hurriedly in this fall after some of its competing began to offer aggressively priced products. It should be noted that to going for low-cost device was a major strategy shift for the Taipei-based electronic major as the company has been relentlessly working to power-up its profit margins with high-end products most of this year.

"In the past few months, we've made project roadmap changes in response to big changes in the tablet market," the person has been quoted as saying to the WSJ. "The launch of the Nexus 10 (made by Google and Samsung Electronics with a US$399 starting price) has changed the outlook for what makes competitive pricing."

It not just an Android tablet, but the world's fourth-largest PC maker by shipments, also plans to develop a low-priced version of its Intel-based Windows 8 tablets by early 2013 as it thinks its current devices are highly priced.