Acer ICONIA Tab A500 : The Best Android Honeycomb tablet money can buy as of today.

Why??? You ask.

Let me tell you why I said that. Acer ICONIA Tab A500 32GB tablet is available from Costco for $489.99 (Item # 581150) and if you shop around you can find the 16GB tablet for around $429.99 or so. Can any other tablet in the market today beat that deal? No…Not at all.

  1. Motorola Xoom costs $579.99 which has the exactly same specs as Acer ICONIA Tab A500.
  2. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 will cost ~$499.99 for a 16GB.
  3. ASUS eee Pad Transformer is an exception that cost $399.00 for 16GB.
  4. Apple iPad 16GB costs $499.00 and then you need other accessories worth another couple of hundred dollars.

All other previous tablet don’t have Android Honeycomb 3.0. They all come with Android 2.2 (Froyo) which doesn’t support Tablet per say.

Now let’s look at Acer ICONIA Tab A500-10S32u official high level Specs:

  • 10.1” HD Multi-Touch Display: (1280 x 800) resolution, 16:10 aspect ratio
  • NVIDIA® Tegra™ 2 Dual Core Mobile Processor
  • 1GB DDR2 Memory
  • NVIDIA® GeForce® GPU
  • eMMC: 16GB on board
  • MicroSD memory card up to 32GB
  • Dolby® Mobile Technology
  • Dual Analog Microphone
  • Dual Speaker
  • 802.11b/g/n Wireless(802.11n 2.4GHz only)
  • Bluetooth® 2.1+EDR
  • 1- Micro USB 2.0 Port
  • 1- USB 2.0 Port
  • 1- Micro HDMI™ Out (supports Dual Display)
  • 5MP Rear Facing Camera with Auto Focus and single LED flash
  • 2MP Front Facing Camera
  • Sensors: G-Sensor, E-Compass, L-Sensor, Gyro-meter
  • Rechargeable Lithium-ion polymer Battery
  • Up to 8-hours battery life

Now check the specs of Motorola Xoom or any other tablet, even Apple iPad. ICONIA Tab actually comes at par or better than the competition.
Based on my rigorous use for over a month, below is my opinion about this fantastic piece of hardware:

  • Hardware: The feel of Acer ICONIA Tab A500 looks so sturdy and solid that it actually feels good in hands. Only downside is that sometimes it feels a little heavy. But except iPad, all other tablet including Xoom are heavy. The overall finish is really beautiful. At least I liked it.
  • Display is just fantastic. Everything looks so clear and bright. 10.1″ with 1280 x 800 resolution is actually a decent size in my opinion from a tablet point of view. Anything smaller or bigger will feel awkward.
  • It supports Flash and that’s one major differentiation from Apple iPad.
  • The 5MP rear camera captures really good stills as well as videos. They look good on the tablet too.
  • ICONIA comes preloaded with Full version games : Electronic Arts “Need for Speed : Shift” and Gameloft’s “Let’s Golf”. I love these games.
  • I loved the dual display feature this tablet offers using the HDMI output. Now I can just mirror the display on Tab to my HDTV. Really cool feature if you want to see a Youtube video or something on your TV.
  • Battery seems to work just fine for my heavy use. It easily lasted for at least 8-10 hours with music, widgets, email and continuous browsing and reading feeds.
  • Android Honeycomb is a really good start for Android tablets, but it does have some issues. In my one month I have restarted or hard reset ICONIA Tab probably more than 30 times. Because it just becomes brick when I quickly rotate the display for some reason.
    Other times I figured there were some apps (News360) whose widgets were making the entire system slow. So essentially it is Android OS issue for tablets, not an Acer issue. You are most probably going to see the same issue on other tablets too. I believe this is something a future OS update should fix.
    But nonetheless, other times it just works awesome. It actually made my laptop useless for me. I have hardly used my laptop in the last one month after I got this. As there is nothing I can’t do on this beautiful tablet.
  • Android Marketplace for Tablet is very limited, hardly 1000 apps. But I was impressed to see that most of the apps I use were there or at least the phone versions worked just fine, though looked a little stretched.
  • There are still some things where I feel there is limitation of what a tablet can do. In some instances I found it was hard to work on a tablet. May be it is not my habit yet to use it for everything.
  • Some websites didn’t behave well with the OS. For example, Tumblr just doesn’t display any dashboard at all unless I clear the browser cookies.
  • For some reason on Android Tablet or may be on this one, I can’t move apps to SD card. So all apps irrespective of their size consumes space on internal storage.
  • In my opinion, websites should not consider tablets as mobiles. They should display the desktop themes not the mobile optimized themes. The desktop themes actually seems to work and look better on this tablet.

Well, there are so many small small things that I just love about my Acer ICONIA Tab A500 that I can’t put all down in this single post and bore you. But I would strongly recommend you to get one from Target, Costco, Walmart or wherever you find one. At the very least get the ASUS eee pad Transformer if you can find one. Both of these have almost the same specs. You will thank me later. :)

If you already have one, then please share your experience and let us know what is your favorite feature. Let me know if you disagree with my analysis.

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