Acer Joins the Honeycomb Tablet Wars
By Harry McCracken | Friday, April 8, 2011 at 9:59 am
No surprise: Acer has announced a tablet running Google’s Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system. The Iconia Tab A500’s specs are what is starting to become standard fare: a 10.1″ display, a dual-core 1-GHz Nvidia processor with integrated GeForce graphics and 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. The Iconia weighs 1.69 pounds and is .52″ thick, specs which indicate that it’s a product of the pre-iPad 2 era. Battery life is quoted as “eight hours of playback for casual games, eight hours of HD video playback and 10 hours of WiFi Internet browsing,” which, I’m guessing, translates into “decent but not quite as good as the iPad 2.”
Unlike some preannounced Honeycomb tablets (coughSamsung), the Iconia will be available soon: it’s a Best Buy exclusive, and Acer says it’ll be available for preorder on April 14th and will go on sale on April 24th. It’s also got the sort of pricetag you’d expect from Acer–one that’s a tad cheaper than the competition, at $449.99.
Oh, and while Acer is saying that it will run Flash, it’s not going to come with it at first. Judging from my experience with Honeycomb Flash in its current form, that isn’t a tragedy.
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April 8th, 2011 at 11:01 am
"a product of the pre-iPad 2 era": would that be the froyocene?
April 8th, 2011 at 12:49 pm
I think that is referring to it's weight and thickness. Samsung's post-IPAD2 reaction was to downsize the thickness of their next offering.
April 9th, 2011 at 9:38 am
The Acer Tablet is nice, not perfect yet, the iPAD may have a little more in depth though put into it. I'll wait until the next version comes out. I may crave new tech, but I do not like to be the one taking the first shots in the war as a weapon gets developed.
My first thought would be to aim for the size of a piece of paper (8×11, although it's current size is close. Far better than those 5" or 7" scratch pads. But they can make good universal remote pads.
The ultimate one would be were you can physically resizing the pad by pull/push the corners to shrink or expand the size. To do that you're talking Nanotech technology needed.