Acer Iconia Tab A500/Review

Acer Iconia Tab A500

The Acer Iconia Tab A500 is the latest in the ongoing parade of Android 3.0 tablets, and with a price that undercuts Apple's iPad 2 by $50, the $450 Iconia Tab (price as of 4/23/2011) distinguishes itself in a crowded field. This tablet earns props for its many strengths, such as its inclusion of both a USB port and a microSD Card slot, its support for Dolby Mobile audio, and its custom home screen widgets that help organize applications. However, while the Iconia Tab goes far toward the goal of replacing a laptop, it still falls short--in part due to its own hardware constraints, and in part due to its software.

The Iconia Tab A500 is the largest of the three tablets that Acer has already introduced. The model tested here is Wi-Fi-only and carries the designation A500-10S16u. A 3G-enabled version is coming on AT&T.

Stylish Design

The elegant, two-tone Iconia Tab is one of the bulkier tablets available today. 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.

Despite its heft, the Iconia Tab felt surprisingly good in my hands. It's slightly longer and wider than the Motorola Xoom, measuring 10.2 by 7.0 by 0.5 inches, to the Xoom's 9.8 by 6.6 by 0.5 inches.

It is also slightly heavier than the Xoom: 1.7 pounds to the Xoom's 1.6 (to be precise, on the PCWorld Labs scale, the Iconia Tab weighed just 0.05 pound more, at 1.66 pounds to the Xoom's 1.61, though Acer lists its weight at 1.69 pounds). Still, the Iconia Tab actually gave me the perception of being lighter than the Xoom when I held it in hand. I tried the two side-by-side, and consistently preferred the overall balance and weighting of the Iconia Tab to the Xoom's. Neither tablet is something I'd want to hold in one hand for any extended period of time, but of the two, I'd give the Iconia Tab the nod. If weight were out of the equation, I'd even prefer 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 tablet feels solidly made in other ways. The buttons and ports are all logically situated. The volume rocker and the rotation lock running along the right edge near the top are distinctively contoured and easy to press. Likewise, the power/sleep button is easily found at the upper right corner, and conveniently glows an unobtrusive, alternating red and white while charging. Even the flap that pulls out of the right side to reveal the microSDHC card slot (and the SIM card slot on other models in the A500 series that support 3G) feels sturdy.

Inside and Out

In its core specs, the Iconia Tab mirrors the Motorola Xoom. It runs a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 250 dual-core processor and has 1GB of RAM. It also has a 10.1-inch, 1280-by-800 pixel display with a 16:10 aspect ratio (great for high-definition content); 16GB of internal eMMC storage (the Xoom has 32GB); and a microSDHC card for up to 32GB of additional storage.

A drawback is how the internal eMMC storage is configured: In some of the file manager apps I downloaded, including the popular Astro File Manager, the memory is seen as being SD card storage, which makes it confusing to tell the difference between internal storage and actual external storage.

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.

The Iconia Tab is the first of the Android 3.0 tablets to ship with both a functioning card slot and a full USB-A host port that accepted a keyboard and all the external USB storage I threw at it, including USB flash drives, a USB media card reader, and even a portable hard drive. Having these ports is a huge boon, in light of tablets like the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook and the T-Mobile G-Slate, neither of which have a USB port, or even a microSD card slot.

The built-in cameras are, spec-wise, among the better tablet cameras: The Iconia Tab has a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with flash, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera (at the upper right corner, below where the power button sits) for video chat. But once again the hardware underperforms: The rear-facing camera's image quality is surprisingly mediocre; colors were off, and it was slow to focus. Given that this is the third Android 3.0 tablet where I've been dissatisfied with the camera quality, it's hard to tell if it's an Android 3.0 issue or the fault of the hardware.

Pros

• Software customizations are helpful
• USB host port and microSD card slot

Cons

• Fine touchscreen grid is bothersome on display
• Heavier and bulkier than other other tablets

Bottom Line

Acer Iconia Tab is a great, reasonably priced choice if you want to access your content via USB sources, but the current limitations of Android 3.0 and what you can do with that content via USB, coupled with this tablet’s display quirks, still make it a qualified recommendation.