Acer Iconia Tab A500

No longer is the Motorola Xoom the only tablet on the market featuring Android 3.0: time to welcome the Acer Iconia Tab A500. Projected to be quite a hit, this new tablet from Acer fits in to the Tablet family nicely. It has the feel of a smartphone, even though the operating system is a step up from Android 2.2 Froyo.

It is fractionally heavier than the Xoom but not in a way you’ll notice, with extra usability through the thin design and rounded edges so it’ll sit comfortably in your hand.

What we like best:

This is a really well-thought out piece of tech. Thanks to Apple’s domination of the market, other tablet manufacturers are really having to pull out all the stops regarding usability. The Acer Iconia A500 has 5 home screens so you’ll have plenty of room to store apps on the 10.1 inch screen.

The A500 is multifunctional, with a micro HDMI slot allowing you to connect this tablet to the television. It also has a microSD for memory expansion. With 16 Gb internal Storage, the microSD will truly come in handy – its competitor the Xoom had a native 32 Gb.

You get a decent core with the NVIDIA Tegra 250 dual core processor which boasts a healthy 1 GHz, the built in 1Gb RAM is more than sufficient for general use.

It’s good to see the full set of the latest tablet technology incorporated in the Iconia A500. The accelerometer and gyroscope allow you to turn pages with a flick of the tablet as well as rotate the A500 making it simple to pass about a group.

Out of the two cameras on the front and back, Acer have made the back camera superior with 5MP (as opposed to the front facing camera’s 2MP), so you’ll be able to take excellent photos of your surroundings but only manage reasonable ones of yourself.

The other feature which we appreciated was the incorporation of Dolby Mobile Audio. Although speaker quality is by no means fantastic, it is one of the better sounding tablets out there after a bit off fiddling with the settings. It’s still no match a pair of speakers but most tablet designs have made little effort with speaker sound.

What we like least

As ever, you’ll find little variety on the Android App market and at the moment tablet-only apps are hard to come by. The A500 isn’t much of a looker either. It’s not bad-looking as such, but it doesn’t have the sturdy and expensive look of the Xoom. Since most people are brand-aware, the very fact that you’re holding a tablet that isn’t an iPad will undoubtedly have the more image-conscious among you feeling a bit concerned.