Review: Acer Iconia Tab A500

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Last April, the Motorola Xoom was the first and only tablet to use the Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Now, there are 4 tablets available in the market. There is the G-Slate from T-Mobile, and the most recent ones were the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer and the Acer Iconia Tab A500. All of them use the same OS but they were engineered to ever so slightly have a unique edge. Among these tablets, ASUS seems to have the biggest market advantage having priced at a very practical $400 tag price. Acer Iconia Tab A500 comes to $450. Let us see how the Iconia Tab A500 will fare in the market.

Hardware
The hardware of the Acer Iconia Tab looks very chic and modern with the brushed aluminum hardware. It does not feel like it is copying that much from the iPad but at least, there is a similar level of sophistication. The sad thing is that they were not able to keep the chicness on all sides. The seams were visible on the sides and they creak sometimes when you move them. When it comes to weight, it is definitely easy to hold on to but it is heavier compared to Xoom. The front of the tablet has the quintessential screen and front facing camera and no buttons to easily go for any orientation. If you want to lock the orientation, there is a lock switch as the top edge. The speakers used were quite good, just a testament that they thought of the whole thing. The screen is quite brilliant for a regular LCD screen but of course, for outdoor usage, this might as well be a reflector.

Battery and performance
The processor of choice for the Acer Iconia Tab A500 was the NVIDIA Tegra 2 with 1GB DDR3 RAM. When the Iconia tab was tested for general purpose Quadrant test, it was quite snappy and even went way ahead Xoom and the G-Slate. When used in real time processes, these settings did not really offer much noticeable impact but at least you know that for the price you pay you got a really solid device. Of course it is not without some little performance issues. Sadly, the battery life was its biggest disappointment. On a standard battery drain test, the Acer Iconia Tab only got 6.55 hours of battery life.

Software
Of course, you have already heard about the Honeycomb so let’s leave that. What the Acer guys did was they included some apps that you might want to use to get started. They place all these apps from LumiRead, Tweetdeck, Photo browsers, music players and others. You might want to change it up and customize it depending on what you really need and to save a lot more power at the end of the day.

Camera
The cameras were plain old duds. They do not have anything really worth a review.

Overall
The Acer Iconia Tab A500 is pretty solid. It has the necessary things you need albeit bad cameras and even worse camera life. If you like the appeal of brushed aluminum then by all means enjoy the tab. However, be sure that you have your battery charger on arms reach.

PhoneArena released this Acer Iconia Tab A500 review video:

Here is Acer Iconia Tab A500 promo video:

Enjoy these gorgeous Acer Iconia Tab A500 pictures courtesy of engadget

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