Acer Iconia Tab A500
June 23, 2011 – 8:00 amA few days ago we looked at the Acer Iconia and loved its futuristic dual screen set-up, today we’re looking at another machine from the Acer Iconia range and this time its the Acer Iconia Tab A500, the Iconia’s little brother.
The Iconia Tab A500 is a Android Honeycomb tablet competing head-on with the Motorola Xoom and Asus Transformer for the title of top Android tablet. Like it’s competition the Iconia A500 Tab has a 10.1″ screen and inside it’s similar too with a Nvidia Tegra 2 processor running at 1Ghz and 1GB of RAM with 32GB of solid state storage. In terms of cameras the Iconia Tab packs two, the rear facing 2MP camera looks at the user and the forward facing 5MP takes the snaps and using both together will allow for some see-me-see-you webchats. The A500 doesn’t have 3G but the A501 model does, important to note this if 3G is important to you.
The Iconia Tab looks and feels well-made, the case is made of aluminium and perhaps will age better than some of the rubber-booted competition as a result, remember these tablets are going to get a load of handling and a wipe clean aluminium exterior maybe isn’t a bad thing.
Battery life isn’t too bad especially if you are used to getting 2 or 3 hours out of a laptop then you’ll be pleasantly surpised that the Iconia Tab is going to run around 10 hours on a full charge.
The Iconia Tab is a pretty decent performer too, it handles games well and generally gives swift movement through apps and general use. Where the Iconia Tab suffers in performanc is shared with all the other Android tablets so we’d expect performance to be pretty consistent and for these problems to be further ironed out with the next Honeycomb update.
In summary, the Acer Iconia Tab A500 is a real contender, make sure you catch the A501 if you need 3G but either way you aren’t going to be disappointed by the looks or performance.
