The sweetest Honeycomb tablets we've seen to date modern packs Android goodness in a package with a new handheld OS version is fine to resolve the problem more tablets Android 'to date: the lack of decent tablet applications sepcific. But the 7-inch Acer Iconia Tab A100 is the form small, too small a battery. Alas, even if we give this great little tablet a strong recommendation, his misery battery, preventing it from reaching the status of the editors choice. "
Wi-Fi only Acer Iconia Tab A100 costs $ 329.99 and the 8GB model and $ 349.99 and the 16GB drive, put it in the middle of a 7-inch tablet in the realm of cheapo models, such as Coby Kyros ($ 199, 2 stars) and the brochure HTC ($ 499, 3.5 stars) playbook and the BlackBerry ($ 499, 2.5 stars). There is no plan for this to be aboard a U.S. carrier 3G, unlike his brother Iconia A501, which is coming out of AT & T. The physical properties, networking and battery
Acer is not a king of industrial design, and the A100 Iconia tab is like a pileup when it comes to the air. Okay if this pill has many other things for him. Iconia Tab A100 is a 7.7 by 4.6 by 0.5 inches (DRC), 13.9 oz plastic tray with a brilliant design of cheap money for research on blue-gray back. Both the front and back feeling a little fat and tend to attract fingerprints. The tablet has a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack, volume buttons, a lock switch of direction, a power button, and plenty of ports on the bottom. Owner is charged an adapter instead of a standard micro-USB connection, but also has a micro-USB port for connecting to a PC, microphone and a HDMI port for connecting the tablet to a HDTV.
Insert the tablet and you will see a 1024 by-600 LCD touch-screen average brightness. In automatic setting of brightness is very gray and the screen is too reflective, but to pump the brightness and it looks good. Stereo speakers on the bottom is quite hard to get their point across, but they suck, just like any other tablet speakers. I've had much better sound through the headphone jack, and more than a pair of Bluetooth stereo headphones. Acer advertises 802.11 a / b / g / n Wi-Fi here, but we did not find any of our 5GHz Wi-Fi with this tablet, although the network connection was simple 2.4GHz.
Interestingly, the A100 also Iconia a blocked SIM card slot, even if the location is mentioned in the guide bar of the Quick Start. Is a missed opportunity, because I love the opportunity to partner with a plan A100 AT & T prepaid tablets.
The A100 Iconia Achilles heel, and the reason it does not receive a nod Editor's Choice, is its poor battery life, thanks to a smaller than usual, a 3060mAh battery. (Most of the tablets have 4000mAh or more of the battery.) We were unable to 3 hours, 53 minutes of video playback on a single charge, not enough for a cross-country flight. The large 7-inch tablet compare this bad in 8 hours, 15 minutes, we got the BlackBerry PlayBook, or 6 hours, 32 minutes for Samsung Galaxy Loss ($ 399, 3.5 stars). It is also smaller than we see on most 10-inch tablets, such as Apple iPad 2 ($ 499, 4.5 stars), which lasted 7 hours, 30 minutes.
Android Apps
Tab Iconia A100 is the first pill shipping with Android 3.2. It's a big deal and a very good thing. Android Market, home of more than 200,000 phone applications is horribly broke the tablets, and Android 3.2 does just enough to fix things. It is very difficult to find programs designed for monitors of pills on the market. While the phone to run applications, they often look awkward or poorly designed.
Android 3.2 's major new feature is the zoom, which convinces phone applications that run on a small phone screen and enlarges text and images instead of filling in bits of the screen with a blank space. It will not be great for 10-inch tablets we've seen on the iPad, programs designed for 3.5-inch screen and enhanced still look very grainy on a 10 inch screen.
But it is a wonderful 7-inch device, which is so small that the scale seems to be still useful. I tried to Conan O'Brien Team Coco app, which looks terrible in most tablets. In normal mode, it's a bad list too much empty space on the right side of the color orange. In zoom mode, it's hard and beautiful.
This is not a panacea, and not by a long shot. Google Android has yet to set in the market for compressed tablet owners can easily get specific applications, and then tablets Android will have a great disadvantage against the iPad. But that experience is better on a shelf until other Android.
The function of the application-level Android 3.2 is the greatest innovation, so for the rest of the honeycomb package, see our initial review of the honeycomb OS.
Performancewise, Iconia The A100 has the same 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core chipset, which is the second table of the honeycomb, and test results are very similar. High-end games such as Galaxy on Fire 2 games smoothly and web pages, even if the flash, loaded quickly, and showed them the contents of the wells.
Acer has no skin Android per se, but adds a lot of their own applications to the tab icons. They are very useful, but there are better alternatives for each of them, and I would be able to pull my own decisions.
NemoPlayer Media Player, browse videos easier thanks to the large standard thumbnail gallery Android. Music is a good ripoff Shazam. Aupeo Pandora is a clone. SocialJogger is a bit 'difficult to Twitter / Facebook client. Movie Studio is a basic movie editor. Hardwod Solitaire Solitaire is the best looking game you've ever seen. Acer Planner is an alternative news from the home screen widgets and e-mail, and Clear.fi is a DLNA client, to understand the network, which enables a small team of highly qualified experts to share media files between computers, tablets and TV . Again, these applications can not be removed.
One thing deflates here: Iconia A100 does not have a traditional USB mass storage and is totally incompatible with Macs. To connect to a Windows PC, you must download the software Acer Acer Sync awkward, after the card appears as a disk, you can drag and drop. Acer says Sync also synchronize Outlook data with the tablet, but could not get this piece of software to find my tablet.Multimedia and conclusions
The A100 is a great little pills Iconia multimedia with HDMI output and easily removable memory cards. The tablet comes with either 8GB or 16 GB of internal memory and supports up to 32GB MicroSD cards stored in a convenient place on the page.
The tablet handled all our test files with aplomb: MPEG4, H.264, WMV, XviD and DivX up to 1080p resolution is played without any problems and MP3, AAC, WMA and OGG music was loud and clear. The tablet has a standard Micro-HDMI that connects directly to an HDMI-compatible TV and mirrors of the screen of the tablet, so something on the screen - video, even streaming - appearing on television. The compressed output 720p instead of 1080p, though, to 1080p files will not appear on the TV in full quality.
There is also a docking port at the bottom, working with a desktop dock $ 79.99. The dock really only one thing to add, the possibility of using an included infrared remote to control the media player tablet when connected to a TV. It is only worth it if you connect the tablet to your TV has a tab lot.The Iconia two cameras, a 2 megapixel unit on the front and a 5-megapixel on the back. The camera was working fine before with the video chat in Google Talk. The camera back is not quite the state of the art: he had autofocus lag a bit more than I like in 1.1 seconds, and its 5-megapixel images were interspersed with color noise. But it captured the good 720p HD video at 30 frames per second, and really, you do not buy a tablet for the camera. Cameras Tablet is a little difficult to use initially (less than 7 inches tablets are less difficult to hold in place 10-inch models.)
Maybe seven inches is the ideal size for a tablet Android. 10 inch tablet Honeycomb inevitable comparisons to the iPad, with its far superior to some library. But seven inches, a lot of interesting things happen: The shelf becomes more portable, it goes where iPads can never go (as in a jacket pocket), and the huge catalog of scales better phone applications.
Other 7-inch tablet to run the Android Android 2.2 or 2.3, mobile operating systems designed for 4-inch screens that look and feel uncomfortable in much broader. In addition, Google said that Android 2.2 is not an ideal film. Iconia A100 Android 3.2, however, is all beautiful decorations UI and more expensive devices like the Motorola Xoom ($ 599, 3.5 stars), and a pocket-sized package.
The Iconia also feels more features than the total Playbook BlackBerry, Android rival that of 7 inches. The playbook still has some gaps, especially in its lack of support by email. The Iconia out of the box to do what you expect.
Acer Iconia The A100 is one of our favorite bars so far. It is ideal for watching movies, video chat, surf the Internet and play with the applications until your battery runs out very small. If not for this reason, the battery would be an absolute editors choice "for tablets Android. For now, it's just the sweetest slice of honeycomb, which we have seen so far.
