Acer ICONIA TAB A100 Review

Design:

Acer took its time to bring the A100 to market, and that extra time shows through in the solid design of this tablet, which, much like Acer’s larger (10.1-inch display) Iconia Tab A500, was originally slated for a spring release.

A few other things caught my eye. The camera specs are beefier than what’s on many tablets: The A100 has a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with LED flash, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera.

Most notable, though, is this tablet’s impressive complement of ports and slots. Along the bottom edge (when holding the tablet in portrait orientation), you have an Micro-HDMI port, docking connector, and microUSB port, flanked by the tablet’s stereo speakers. At the far right bottom is the AC power port. Just up along the right edge of the tablet (or top, if holding it in landscape orientation) is the sturdily designed slot cover that protects the microSD card slot.

The A100 measures half-an-inch thick, effectively the same as Galaxy Tab Wi-Fi and the HTC Flyer, but the A100 has a gently contoured design that gives it the effect of seeming slimmer than the Tab.

Features:

The Acer Iconia tab A100 has a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and 1GB of RAM. It also boasts 802.11n Wi-Fi, support for Bluetooth 2.1, and an accelerometer, a gyroscope, GPS, a digital compass, and memory expansion via microSD.

The A100 sports a 7-inch, 1,024×600-pixel-resolution Twisted Nematic (TN) display. Onboard storage options include 16GB and 8GB integrated, with a microSD card slot compatible with up to 32GB cards.

Interface:

The A100 comes with a few minor user interface enhancements, but none of them will make you want to rush out and buy the tablet.

It’s more of a system for organising apps than a real UI addition – you run an app that groups other apps. There’s an app for games that simply provides another place to put game app icons instead of the main home screen.

The Acer Iconia Tab A100′s smaller screen size means the interface might be more cumbersome to use than that on a 10-inch tab. That’s because, even though Android 3.2 is supposed to resize objects on the screen automatically, the screen still runs at 1024 x 600 resolution. So when you select some buttons, you might need to use a fingertip.

Camera:

The camera is 5MP and takes pretty great photos as well as 720p HD video recording. I didn’t test the front facing camera as

Acer Iconia Tab A100 Camera Sample

we’ve all seen how those look for now until we get some better cameras in the front.

Music:

For music, we tested the MusicA app included with the Acer Iconia Tab A100 and the Google Music app. We loaded albums from The Boxer Rebellion, some techno from Daft Punk and a few pop hits as a sanity check. The Acer Iconia Tab A100 isn’t bad as an MP3 player, and the speaker quality gets a boost from Dolby Mobile in terms of tonal clarity.

Battery:

Acer was nice enough to throw in a 1530 mAh battery with the Acer Iconia A100 Tab.

The Acer Iconia Tab A100 Specification

Performance:

Though Acer doesn’t highlight this in it press materials, the main advantage to having Android 3.2 is the apparent performance boost. Like so many other tablets on the market, the A100 packs a 1GHz Tegra 2 processor. In general, we think the SoC has performance limitations, with some visible lags being fairly typical.

The A100 also has Flash 10.3 on board, and while it loaded sites a bit more briskly than other Honeycomb tablets, the difference was subtle, at best.

Conclusion:

As 7-inch tablets go, the Acer Iconia Tab A100 is one of the most feature-rich we’ve seen, with a full Honeycomb experience, HDMI-out, and expandable memory. If your preference is for 7-inch tablets

PRO:

• Small and compact
• Good e-reader
• Latest Android OS
• Re-sizes smartphone apps

CON:

• Average screen
• Poor battery
• Boring design