The Acer Iconia A500 has a lot going for it. For one, it runs on Android 3.0, so that effectively makes it the only Honeycomb tablet commercially available in Indian stores. Second, it resolves a lot of the issues surrounding the tablets launched in the market so far – throwing in two USB ports, an HDMI-out and a micro SD card slot. So does Acer really have a winning formula with this one?

Not another clone

Looks wise, the A500 is like a breath of fresh air – it is nothing like an iPad. With a screen size of 10.1-inches and a net weight of nearly three-quarters of a kilo, it's got netbook-ish dimensions. A shiny black bezel surrounds the screen, and the back and sides are made of brushed aluminium, an increasingly popular casing material for mobile phones and laptops. There are two cameras, the front cam is a 2-megger, while the rear is a 5-megapixel, with LED flash. The two USB ports we mentioned include a mini USB. Apart from the mini HDMI port, there's SIM card and micro SD card slot concealed in a pull-out flap. You also get a volume rocker switch, 3.5mm headphone jack as well as a dock connector (which hooks up to a docking station that ships with an IR remote – sold separately). The device is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 enabled.

User interface

There's a transparent grid on the screen which Acer has included to help you arrange your icons on the five customisable home screens. However, even though we found it helpful, the grid was visible even when performing other tasks, and ended up disrupting the view.

One thing that's missing from the tablet is the lack of dedicated Android buttons. What you get are just some vague arrow keys and an icon that opens up recent apps. The only plus side of course is that the screen can be oriented in any of the four directions. We should add that auto-orientation was really sensitive, but you can turn it off via a physical lock switch on the side.

Acer's outdone itself on the capacitive touch screen. It's very smooth and responsive, and we had no problems when it came to scrolling or typing. Because of the screen size, the keyboard is comfortable even for two-handed typing, and we found it easy to tap out long emails or perform a quick search online.

Media usage

With a hefty 16GB of internal memory, the A500 can take a further 64GB of storage via micro SD card. And that's not all, you can even hook up your external hard drive via USB and play content directly off it. We connected our 160GB WD hard drive to the A500, but it took ages for videos and photos to show up on the tablet. We tried Acer's Nemo Player, Android's Gallery and even some third-party apps like QuickPic, but nothing seemed to accelerate the process. This is more of an Android issue than an Acer one, and Honeycomb still has a lot of limitations when it comes to USB support, which we hope will be ironed out in future Android versions.

The rear-camera has a couple of scene and colour modes to choose from, and you can also tweak White Balance and Flash settings. Results were far from satisfactory – our photos looked washed out and the colour reproduction was poor. The front camera wasn't great either – we got a lot of flare from light sources – but it's good enough for video chats.

The browser was snappy and convenient to use, and let us open multiple tabs easily. The screen also supports multi -gesture like double tap and pinch to zoom, so we had no problems reading web pages.

Acer has its native apps for social networking, ebooks and media which we've used on their phones before. These include Social Jogger, the afore-mentioned Nemo Player, Photo Browser and LumiRead. We preferred the Android versions of these apps, which are faster and more intuitive.

We played some high-def (it only supports 720p playback) videos on the A500, and although the 1280x800 screen was clear and colour reproduction was good, there were a lot of pixels visible to the naked eye, which was quite a turn off. The stereo speakers located at the rear are better than what you get on most tablets, and despite the sound being tinny, were loud enough to watch a movie comfortably. Gaming on the tablet was an impressive experience. We did a few laps on NFS Shift, and were surprised when the gyroscope kicked into action, letting us steer and manoeuvre as well as the iPad 2! Of course we tried Angry Birds Rio and Hero of Sparta HD, and graphics reproduction on the latter was excellent. The touch screen also made navigating in the game a breeze.

Performance

This tablet runs a dual-core Tegra 1GHz chip, so it's considerably snappier than the Samsung Galaxy Tab. We ran a couple of Android benchmarking tests to compare scores. On Quadrant, we achieved a score of 2,090, while the Motorola Xoom clocks up to about 1,850. On Linpack, we scored 41.77 MFLOPS, and just to give you an idea, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 managed only 35.643 MFLOPS as its top score. Multi-tasking is a breeze with the A500, but the tablet takes ages to perform simple tasks like opening the Gallery once you've snapped a photo, which is really frustrating. Battery-wise, the A500 doesn't do too well, giving us only about 4-6 hours of usage with Wi-Fi on, even though Acer claims 8 hours of play-back time.

Our verdict

Despite being a little rough on the edges, Acer wins points for innovation with the A500. It's been priced almost on par with an entry-level iPad 2, so if you don't really want to go the Apple way, this might just be the Android tablet to pick.

Love: Good connectivity options, doesn't freeze

Hate: Poor battery life, sub-standard screen

Rs 31,515

ketaki@thehindu.co.in

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