Acer Iconia Tab A500 - Iconic Honeycomb

A Tablet Icon

There's no doubt about it - 2011 will be the year of the tablet. Judging from Apple's first salvo with the Apple iPad 2 and its high demand, it's clear that tablets have become the flavor of the year. But surely, its competitors aren't going to let the Cupertino-based company dominate the scene any further. Acer has decided to crash the party, presenting the Acer Iconia Tab A500 as the company's first Google Android 3.0 tablet. And mind you, this is a far cry from what other Android tablets have to offer over a year ago.

The Tab A500, like many other upcoming Honeycomb (the dessert namesake for Android 3.0) tablets, will be powered by NVIDIA's dual-core Tegra 2 1GHz processor and sports a 10.1-inch display.

To understand how the Tab A500 functions, we'll be taking a quick tour of its exterior. If you're looking at the pure aesthetics, the Acer Iconia Tab A500 gets the thumbs up from us for using a brushed aluminum casing. Its side and front profile consists of a 10.1-inch display surrounded by a black bezel. Thanks to Android 3.0's redesigned user interface, physical buttons are conspicuously missing from the front and takes its place as part of the user interface as virtual shortcuts.

The cool metal finish also signifies how much heavier the Tab A500 is at 730g, thus placing it at a distinct disadvantage for one-handed operations. This is especially prominent when we put it up against the iPad 2, which weighs at least 100g less. The weight is evenly distributed when we held the Tab A500 with both hands. Holding it for prolonged periods, however, can still get quite tiring.

What came off as a comfort in the most literal sense is the Tab A500's rounded edges. Unlike the iPad 2's newly designed, sharper edges, the Tab A500 is relatively more comfortable to grip.

While its front might be clear of any physical buttons, the Tab A500's sides and crown houses a variety of buttons and ports. Starting from the top, we have the volume button. Interestingly, this button is contextual in nature according to your tablet's orientation. This made perfect sense to us as we switched between the landscape and portrait orientation and adjusted the volume up and down without confusion.

The Tab A500 takes a cue from Apple with an orientation lock situated beside the volume button. In short, you won't have to tap through too many settings to keep your screen orientation firmly locked in position. Next to the lock, we found a spot protected by a plastic cover. Underneath it, we spotted a microSD card slot. What is more interesting, is a sealed up slot, which indicates a possible 3G version of the Tab A500.

Useful as they are, we were disappointed at how flushed the volume buttons were. This is unfortunately repeated on its power button located at the left. The 3.5mm audio port is positioned right below the power button, with a mini-HDMI port finding a cozy spot at the bottom left.

We now direct your attention to the right, which is where you'll find the microUSB port for data transfers. A full-sized USB port is also included, giving you the option to plug in an external HDD for extra storage or a USB keyboard to ease your typing experience on the Tab A500. The Tab A500 opts to use a power jack as a charging option. We can't help but wonder why there's a need for this, given how it has a docking connector that is similarly designed to charge the tablet.

In contrast, tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab and both the iPad and iPad 2 opt for a 30-pin connector as the same charging point, doing away with unnecessary ports and keeping the slate clean.

Keeping Tabs on an Icon

With Google's aggressive move into the mobile arena with its Android platform, it's no surprise to see an Android tablet gunning for a slice of the tablet pie. Earlier models such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab were slightly shortchanged with the Android 2.2 Froyo firmware, which Google has admitted that it wasn't optimized for tablets.

Android 3.0 changes all that with its reworked interface designed for the tablet form factor. Earlier Android users might not be able to identify with certain elements, but that's not to say a steep learning curve will be involved. Basic apps such as your browser and Gmail get a slight upgrade with incognito tabs and a two-pane interface respectively.

Notifications have become more active and dynamic, though it is now situated at the bottom right of the interface. And to top it off, a new recent apps shortcut is added beside the home and back shortcuts, listing the five most recent apps and a thumbnail view of its last state in a pop up menu.

With most Android 3.0 tablets sharing the same stock interface from Google, it's hard to distinguish their unique features. For better or worse, each vendor has tried to add a unique touch to their products, and in the case of the Tab A500, Acer tosses in a few apps to complement the Honeycomb experience. In essence, they aren't exactly apps, given how these apps such as eReading, Games, Multimedia and Social are actually pages within a separate interface. Apps shortcuts are easily added onto these pages, somewhat similar to how one adds widgets onto the Android home screen by clicking on the + sign at the top right.

Besides the four main apps, there's also a variety of apps that covers a wide range of features. This includes an e-book reader called LumiRead, though we would hate to spend much of our time holding this relatively heavy tablet for reading. Social media gets its own app called SocialJogger which pulls news feed from your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Unfortunately, its interface is sluggish and there are better alternatives such as Tweetdeck that performs the exact same function, and more.

Multimedia-wise, the Tab A500 adds two specific apps that handle multimedia files, namely the NemoPlayer and Clear.Fi. apps. Both apps won't be our first choice for multimedia apps, given how Google's own Gallery and Music apps can perform much better with a more basic and intuitive interface. However, we did notice the media server feature within Clear.Fi., which is where the Tab A500's DLNA feature kicks in and streams content from connected PCs through the Wi-Fi network.

Busy for the Honeycomb

Being an Android tablet, its performance benchmarks would be similar to its mobile counterparts. Unfortunately, we were unable to run the NeoCore benchmark that's used to evaluate the GPU performance. As such, we've included SmartBench 2011 to evaluate its productivity and gaming performance purely on the Android platform. To give you a rough idea of how devices compare across various platforms, we've also included the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. In summary, the three benchmarks that will be performed and their purposes are:

• Quadrant, which measures the device's performance based on its CPU, I/O and GPU. Simply put, Quadrant is a benchmark that gives you a general idea of how your device performs against other Android devices.
• Smartbench 2011 is a multi-core friendly benchmark application that measures the overall performance of your device. It reports both Productivity and Games Index to suit both productivity users and 3D gaming users. This benchmark is a comparison between Android tablets only.
• SunSpider JavaScript benchmark is also tossed in, acting as a common benchmark that measures the browsing performance of the tablet and is applicable for all platforms.

For comparison purposes, we look at the results from a few other recent tablets, namely the Motorola Xoom, ASUS Eee Pad Transformer and Apple iPad 2. It is still early days for the Android tablets, and judging from the Smartbench scores of the Tab A500 against the Xoom and Eee Pad Transformer, Acer's Honeycomb tablet has a clear lead in two out of three benchmarks, though it is followed closely by the ASUS slate.

With all three tablets powered by NVIDIA's dual-core Tegra 2 chip and keeping its operating system relatively clean with no add-ons to its firmware, it's not surprising to find similar results across these three Android 3.0 slates.

The Sunspider JavaScript benchmark gives us an idea of how each tablet will perform and manage its resources when used as a web browsing device. With the same tablets, and adding on the iPad 2 as another comparison point, we noticed very similar results across the four tablets. As such, it is safe to say that the performance difference is quite negligible amongst the tablets, and most importantly, between the iOS and Android platforms.

Do note that the scores that were obtained are only an estimate of the performance, and are not conclusive of their actual real world performance. This is especially true for the Tab A500, which didn't exactly reflect what we saw from its scores. Earlier on, we did mention how Acer's own apps gave us a few doubts over its speed and performance. Thankfully, if you stick to the Android 3.0 interface, you'll find a relatively smooth experience awaiting you. Switching between pages came off pretty swift, but the screen orientation and transition into the main menu were slower than expected.

With NVIDIA's Tegra 2 powering the Tab A500 and NVIDIA's Tegra Zone app available on the Android Market, we also got around to testing games that are optimized for the Tegra 2 experience. A game of Dungeon Defenders did gives us a feel of how the Tegra 2 processor managed the game - average at best, with some slight slowdowns when graphics became heavier and strained its resources.

A Movie Icon

Without a doubt, the tablet is designed to be a multimedia device, and that's also where the Tab A500 stands as an Android 3.0 tablet. Its 10.1-inch screen is a clear indication of this stance, giving you a comfortable view when it comes to movie watching. At its maximum brightness, we were pleased at how the Tab A500 displayed its 1280 x 800 screen resolution with sufficient clarity across various viewing angles. Unfortunately, you'll have to be live with the screen glare from the reflective screen.

Behind the Tab A500 lies a pair of speakers. Yes, it's a pair, not a single speaker as seen on the iPad 2. What's more, the Tab A500 includes audio enhancement in the form of Dolby Mobile to complement its stereo speakers. Needless to say, we found the video experience quite enjoyable, if you have a stand to hold the Tab A500 and keep your hands free.

The Tab A500 comes with two cameras with different imaging resolutions - the rear camera is capable of 5-megapixel images while the front camera, which is mostly used for video chats, sports a 2-megapixel sensor. While we can't imagine why anyone would want to carry a hefty tablet to do photography on-the-go, we aren't ignoring the imaging capabilities of the Tab A500.

Noisy images with very visible loss of details across the whole photo were returned by its rear 5-megapixel camera. From what we can gather, imaging with the Tab A500 should be avoided.

To round up our performance test, we have the battery test. To demonstrate the tablet's capabilities in handling high quality videos, we ran a 720p video on the Tab. This video loop is done with the following parameters:

• Screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connection active
• Constant data stream via email and Twitter

These parameters were also locked in for a few other tablets, in particular the Motorola Xoom and the Apple iPad and iPad 2.

A quick look at the self-explanatory charts above should be sufficient - the Tab A500 wasn't even close to the Apple slates. Was this the result of better power management due to the iOS platform? Perhaps, but if you were to see how the Xoom fared against the Tab A500, you might think otherwise.

With at least an hour more in battery mileage against the same Android 3.0 Acer tablet, the Motorola slate brought us to a conclusion - the Tab A500 is a battery guzzler. These numbers are further reflected in the portability index, which places the Tab A500 as the least portable among the recent tablets. The weight, dimensions and sub-par battery life make it much less appealing to those who seek a long-lasting tablet that's also easy on the arms.

We paced the Tab A500 through a routine that includes web browsing, reading, video playback and gaming to get an idea of how it performs in the real world. With its Wi-Fi constantly active and pulling data through Gmail, a fully charged Tab A500 survived for an entire day. While this is relatively sufficient for the average user, we were hoping to get more mileage out of the Tab A500.

Feasting on the Honeycomb

If you're planning to acquire an Android 3.0 tablet, we say the time is ripe. The Acer Iconia Tab A500 has a few propositions, both good and bad, that's worth considering. For one, the brushed metal finish along its back appeals to us, though it tends to give us the slip occasionally. The 730g weight will definitely be felt as you spend more time with the unit. As great as it looks, the Tab A500 doesn't score too well with us on the usability aspect. The volume and power buttons were unfortunately too flushed in, and we spent a few frustrating moments trying to adjust the volume or put the tablet to sleep. The orientation lock is a nice touch though, considering that the alternative is to dive deep into the settings menu to perform a simple task.

Google Android 3.0 plays a vital role for Acer to establish a foothold in the tablet market. Besides the reworked and intuitive Honeycomb interface, Acer adds a touch of its own via a separate interface that's easily loaded from its eReading, Multimedia, Social or Games app. Furthermore, preloaded apps such as NemoPlayer and Clear.Fi adds more punch to its multimedia delivery. However, quantity doesn't equate to quality, which was clearly felt with the sluggish feel of the Acer-designed interface. In short, stick with the Honeycomb interface for an easier time.

Powered by NVIDIA's dual-core Tegra 2 processor, the Tab A500 did give us the results we expected from its Quadrant and SmartBench 2011 benchmarks. Page transitions and apps loading were smooth. Tossing in resource intensive games, however, could lead to the occasional slowdowns in frame rates. Fortunately, the video experience was top notch. Factors such as the Dolby Mobile audio enhancement, a generous 10.1-inch display with a screen resolution of 1280 x 800 and a good viewing angle contributed to the Tab A500's appeal as a multimedia tablet.

Alas, for every plus point we found, the Tab A500 has another weakness to sway our opinion. Its 5-megapixel camera's imaging capabilities leave little to be desired, with prominent noise seen on its photos. To be fair, you won't want to hold a hefty tablet to do digital imaging. Its imaging quality aside, what was of concern to us, is the battery life. With the Tab A500 lasting for just 4 hours and 33 minutes on a video loop, its mileage is significantly lower than a similar tablet such as the Motorola Xoom or the Apple iPad 2.

At S$799, the Acer Iconia Tab A500 will be pitted against a number of tablets at that price bracket. The similar Apple iPad 2 32GB Wi-Fi version is priced close to it at S$798, while its immediate Android competitors such as the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer 16GB Wi-Fi variant comes in slightly cheaper at S$699. On this aspect, we have to say the Acer slate is reasonably priced. Considering its average but decent performance and strong multimedia features, this Android 3.0 tablet does have its attractions, provided that one sticks with the stock Android interface over Acer's own offering.

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