The Acer Iconia Tab A500 is a tablet running the Android Honeycomb OS. It has a 10 inch wide screen (1280×800 resolution), weighs 1.69 pounds and is 13.3mm thick. It sports the popular dual-core 1 GHz Tegra 2 processor, and has 1 GB of DDR3 RAM. All of this makes for a snappy, responsive tablet with a large, comfortable screen.
In this review, I’m not going to get into all of the technical details or benchmarks. I’ll focus more on usability and my impressions of it while putting it through day-to-day use. This is my first experience with the Android Honeycomb OS, so take that into account while reading my review. That said, let’s get started.
With this tablet, you get a set of dolby stereo speakers, a standard headphone jack, a volume rocker (which changes direction, depending on the tablet’s orientation – pretty slick), a screen orientation lock switch, a micro SD card slot, a dedicated charger port, micro-USB for file transfers, standard host USB for keyboard/thumb drive, a dock connector and a mini-HDMI port for output to a TV. You also get a front and rear facing camera.
The Iconia is comfortable to hold – not too heavy, but also not so light that it feels like a toy in your hands. Its construction feels solid and durable.
One of the first things I noticed was that if I installed apps that weren’t quite designed for Honeycomb, the Iconia did a few strange things. The screen orientation lock wouldn’t engage, the screen orientation wouldn’t change when the tablet was rotated, other apps would not function, etc. When I took those off and rebooted the tablet, all of those symptoms magically disappeared. One other issue that continues to exist is that when the screen is locked, it will sometimes turn on by itself. This is a known issue with this product, and rumor has it that it will be repaired when the next release of Honeycomb is out (sometime this summer). Currently that is the only issue that I have with the device.
Navigation on the tablet is smooth and fast. Moving from screen to screen is snappy, and opening apps is quick as well in any orientation. The speakers sound great for the tiny little things they are. I’ve also encoded a few movies to play on it, which play perfectly (More on this at the end of the article).
Although this tablet is Wifi only (It’s rumored a 3G version will be available sometime), I carry it with me everywhere I go. Most places I go have wifi anyway, so it isn’t an issue for me. I use it routinely to check news sites (I have the CNN and USA Today apps – very nice, as well as the News360 app which aggregates news from several sources), check the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to (using Newsr, which integrates with Google Reader), check and update Twitter (using TweetComb) and browse websites. It is generally easier to use than pulling out my MacBook for what would amount to a few minutes worth of browsing.
I also have the Amazon Kindle app, WeatherBug, and of course, Angry Birds. All of these apps work great, and more Honeycomb optimized apps are being added to the market all the time.
One of my favorite apps on this tablet is SpringPad. On iOS I used Evernote, but the developers haven’t quite kept up with the Android tablet market, where SpringPad has been all over it. I use this app for notes from anything to teaching, to recipes, to things I just need to jot down so I’ll remember them later. This isn’t so much a plug for SpringPad (though I do love them!) as it is for the ease of use of this tablet.
Another cool thing about the tablet is that Google Talk has video chat built in. So if you have someone using Google Talk in gmail, you can do a video chat with them. I’ve used this multiple times and it works flawlessly. The front-facing camera even tracks your head so that if you move (within reason of course), it pans the camera with your movement. Ok, so the camera is fixed so it technically can’t pan. It appears it zooms in somewhat on your face and tracks your movements that way. Pretty slick anyway.
Conclusion: Aside from the screen turning on randomly (it goes back off after a few seconds generally), this tablet is just about as perfect as they come. In my mind, the only downside to this tablet in comparison to the iPad is the availability of apps. The Android market is still growing strong, so I wouldn’t think that to be a big problem.
NOTE FOR VIDEO ENCODING: I had encoded videos using HandBrake for my Apple TV 2. They work perfectly on that, of course. When I copied those videos to the Iconia, they were jumpy, missing frames and generally terrible to try to watch. I found a YouTube video that details how to encode videos for smooth viewing on the Iconia. The video references the Xoom, but using the same HandBrake settings works perfectly on the Iconia.
