Review: Acer Iconia Tab A500

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit right up front that I have not been a great fan of tablet computers. It is my view that, while these devices can typically perform many functions - which is good - they do not do too many of these functions all that well.

When I pondered whether Acer's Iconia Tablet A500 would convince me otherwise, I was told by the company supplying it for review that if I was willing to keep an open mind, it would.

Before I tell you whether the Iconia A500 managed to sway me, let us have a quick look at its most important specifications.

The Iconia has a 10.1-inch touch-screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. You can buy it with either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage. It boasts a microSD card slot, both micro USB 2.0 and USB 2.0 ports, as well as an HDMI port. It is powered by a dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, a ULP GeForce GPU, and a Tegra 2 T20 chipset, and runs on Android 3.0.

As you would expect from a tablet that prides itself on its ability to offer entertainment, it has built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, an accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate, and a Gyro sensor. There are also two cameras - 5MP and 2MP.

While most of these specifications and features are becoming pretty much standard fare, I certainly appreciated the addition of a USB 2.0 port, since this makes it so much easier to transfer information to and from the tablet. This feature alone makes the A500 more desirable than those tablets that do not have USB ports.

So, did the Acer Iconia Tablet A500 convert me?

When it comes to entertainment, I'll admit that I am now more of a fan of tablets than I was before I had spent time with the A500. However, when it came to getting any work done, it showed those traits that are unfortunately common to the breed as a whole.

I don't have enough space to go into details about why I still don't believe tablets are great for productivity, but what I can say is that when it comes to actually doing work on the A500, my Acer Aspire One beats it hands-down in terms of typing ease.

When it comes to wireless connectivity, the A500 also lost. The WiFi on it was so poor, that I didn't get full signal, despite being seated two metres from my wireless router! So the Aspire won in being able to connect to a wired network, and having more USB ports.

As an entertainment device, the A500 does much better, packing a lot of fun into a neat little package. However, it has some positives and negatives here, too.

On the positive side, there is the ease of use of the touch-screen. It reacted quickly to taps, and since most sites and apps are icon-based and preloaded onto the A500, navigation between them was simple.

The USB port made it easy for me to browse pictures stored on a memory stick, and I was impressed when the A500 detected my MP3 player and let me listen to the FLAC-encoded music stored on it.

Watching downloaded videos was a pretty good experience too, and while on-screen videos were limited to 720P resolution, the A500 has the capability to send full HD video from its HDMI output.

As I tended to look more intently at the screen when watching movies, or while looking at pictures, the smears and smudges on it became more noticeable, and this became an annoyance, because I constantly felt like wiping the screen. This is one of the downsides of using the screen as a control interface.

Gaming on the A500 was another big plus, and in this it actually scored points against the Aspire One. The built-in Gyro made playing Need for Speed a lot more interactive and enjoyable than it would have been had I played the same game on my Aspire One.

The final point worth mentioning is that while the cameras on the A500 worked, I wouldn't say they were the tablet's best features. Image quality was merely okay, and good for slow, short takes, but all budding Stephen Spielbergs should know that they aren't going to film anything epic on their A500s.

The rating of 7.5 out of 10 that I've given the Acer Iconia A500 is essentially for its entertainment value. If its WiFi was better, it would have scored a little higher, as this would have added to the overall mobility of the tablet.