Acer's Iconia Tab A500 is a 10.1in. Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablet that joins the Motorola Xoom, Asus Eee Pad Transformer and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in a rapidly populating market. The recent Windows 7-based Iconia Tab W500 didn't impress us greatly. Will the very similarly priced A500 (£449.99 inc. VAT; £375 ex. VAT) do any better?
DesignAt 700g, the Iconia Tab A500 is relatively heavy compared to other similar-sized tablets — except its Windows 7-based W500 stablemate
The A500's dimensions of 260mm by 177mm by 13.3mm put it in the same ballpark as the Asus Eee Pad Transformer (271 x 171 x 12.98mm), its W500 sibling (275 x 190 x 15.9mm) and Apple's iPad 2 (241 x 185.7 x 8.8mm). It is relatively heavy at 700g — by contrast, the Eee Pad Transformer weighs 680g and the Wi-Fi/3G iPad 2 613g. The Iconia Tab W500 is even heavier at 970g, so perhaps Acer gives weight a different weighting, as it were, to other tablet manufacturers.
Although its weight means that holding the Iconia Tab A500 in one hand becomes a chore after a while, there's no doubt that a 10.1in. screen is far superior to smaller 7in. devices for a wide variety of tasks. The A500's screen has a native resolution of 1,280 by 800 pixels. On its automatic brightness setting it looked a bit dull, and with the manual setting at full brightness it seemed a little washed-out. We were frequently distracted by the screen's reflectiveness, which was especially noticeable when working next to a window. Train travellers in particular might find this a problem. The screen also gets greasy quite quickly from fingerprints and will need regular cleaning. We have no complaints about the viewing angles, which are exemplary. The multitouch touchscreen is responsive, which makes it easy to sweep through the five Android home screens. The automatic screen rotation is smooth too. We mentioned the A500's neat styling. This extends to the small silver lozenge-shaped volume rocker on the top edge and the tiny slider switch next to it that can be used to toggle automatic screen rotation. We found this very useful and would like to see it adopted on more tablets. The A500's good looks are marred by a plastic hinged cover embedded into the aluminum on the top edge of the chassis. This protects a microUSB slot and a SIM card slot. The latter is covered by a 'warranty void if seal is broken' sticker because there's no mobile broadband support in this device. The remainder of the top edge is clear of ports and connectors. The bottom edge houses a single proprietary connector for an optional charging dock. We've not seen a price for this in the UK. The left edge carries the on/off switch, a 3.5mm headset jack and a mini-HDMI port. On the right is a Micro-USB port, a round-pin power connector and a full sized USB port — with USB host capability, so you can attach external devices. We tried a USB stick (which worked) and a mouse, (which didn't). Acer doesn't provide an HDMI cable. At the back is a pair of speakers that deliver tinny but quite loud sound, a lens for the 5-megapixel camera and a small LED flash. There's also a front-facing 2-megapixel camera in the screen bezel, on the left side with the device in landscape mode. The main camera's performance is average, and Acer could probably have done more with it. Features