| Acer Iconia Tab A500 Tablet: The Tablet comes with USB host port and microSD card slot, running Android 3.0.
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Review
The Acer Iconia Tab offers Android Honeycomb on a 10.1-inch screen along with GPS, front and rear cameras, Adobe Flash compatibility, full-size USB host port, HDMI output, and a reasonable price.
Engine Room
A500 running a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 250 dual-core processor and has 1GB of RAM.
The Design
The A500 is elegant, is one of the bulkier tablets available today, has a 10.1-inch screen with a 1,280x800-pixel resolution just like the Motorola Xoom, A500 has rounded off corners and edges make it comfortable to hold, but a weight of 765g makes it the heaviest of the new generation of Honeycomb tablets.
The 10.1-inch multitouch display has a black bezel, plus rounded silver edges and backing made of brushed aluminum. The screen is hardly oleophobic, but then, none of the tablets I've seen so far can actually do effective battle against the fingerprint monsters.
The A500 measuring 10.2 by 7.0 by 0.5 inches, while the Xoom's 9.8 by 6.6 by 0.5 inches. The A500 is also slightly heavier than the Xoom. Apart from the weight, the Iconia Tab to Apple's iPad 2; while the iPad 2, at 1.3 pounds, is the lightest of the three, its 7.3-inch width makes it less conducive for holding in vertical orientation and typing with two hands.
The Display
The device has a good display both bright and colorful--most of the time, and the angle of view is adequate (but not great just 80 degrees according to Acer's own specs), but I had a couple of issues. First, a grid is quite visible on the display. Acer says that the grid should be visible only at specific angles, and that it's there because of the touchscreen technology the company uses. It seems to cheapen the high-res screen and makes it harder to enjoy photos and read text (large text sizes and certain fonts help mitigate this feeling).
The Storage
A500 has 16GB of internal eMMC storage; and a microSDHC card for up to 32GB of additional storage.
Connectivity
The broad-reaching specs also include an accelerometer, a gyroscope, GPS, and a compass. It has Bluetooth 2.1 and 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity. The Iconia Tab uses Acer's Clear.fi branding for its DLNA media server support, and a Clear.fi app helps facilitate connecting the tablet to other DLNA sources; but I ended up using it as another way to view my multimedia on the tablet, and had problems sharing the content and grabbing content from other sources
When held in the landscape orientation, the tablet has its power and headphone jacks at the left edge, toward the top; Micro-HDMI output along the left edge, at the bottom; and a micro-USB port for tethered data transfers and a USB-A port at the lower right edge. Along the top is the flap protecting the microSDHC card slot, and at bottom is the obtrusively bulky dock connector.
Imaging
The Iconia Tab has a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with flash, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. The front-facing camera will offer you 640 x 480 video along with 2-megapixel snaps. The 5-megapixel camera offers auto and infinity focus, but misses out on the Xoom’s macro focus option. It’s not a huge deal as the camera will macro in auto mode anyway.
Video from the rear camera offers HD of the 720p variety and is a little soft and lacking punch, but otherwise does the job well enough. Again, we can’t see anyone opting to use a tablet as their primary video device, so we won’t get too upset if the results aren’t that good. You get the option to switch between internal and microSD memory too.
Battery Life
The battery life is up to 8 hours.
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