Acer Iconia A100/A101 review

We review Acer's first 7-inch Android tablet, the Honeycomb-powered Iconia A100

Acer is one of those companies most people are aware of in passing. We’ve all seen its laptop and desktop PCs adorning the shelves of our local electronics stores and generally they offer competitive performance at a more affordable price tag than more well-known manufacturers.

The Iconia range includes smartphones as well as both 10-inch and 7-inch tablets, and while the new phones are by no means the company’s first foray into phone and touchscreen technology, the Iconia range of tablets are the first Acer has launched.

There are two versions of the Iconia 7-inch tablet, the A100 and the A101. The A100 is Wi-Fi only and costs around £250, while the A101 is 3G enabled and will therefore take a SIM card, it’ll cost you a bit more at around the £300 mark.

Other than 3G capability there is no difference between the devices and both run Android’s tablet-tailored Honeycomb version 3.2.

For this review we got our hands on an A101 specifically, though we didn’t actually use a SIM card – all our data connectivity was through Wi-Fi.

The thing which immediately strikes you about the Iconia A100 is the build quality. It feels like a very solid device and the visual design is certainly appealing.

Leaked images of the next Motorola Xoom show a chiselled and angular shape, rather similar to some of Nokia’s more recent handsets, but it seems Acer has quietly pipped Motorola to the post in releasing a tablet with this type of form factor.

Much of the front of the device is taken up by the screen which is a design choice we're always in favour of and generally we think the Iconia A100 looks slick.

It’s a fairly thin device as tablets go at only 13.1mm and although it feels quite light in the hand at 470g, as with most tablets larger than a phone you’ll notice the weight if you hold it for a while.

Despite the 7-inch size, a two handed approach is the order of the day here and the tablet feels much more comfortable in landscape mode anyway thanks to Honeycomb’s ‘thumbs’ interface approach.

Gyro and Accelerometer sensors are built-in for screen orientation and in a smart move Acer has included a physical screen ‘lock’ button on the device so you can stop it from rotating if you wish.

Another area we were impressed with was the display which offers very sharp image quality and vivid colours.

The Iconia Tab 101 features a 16 million colour 7-inch LCD capacitive touchscreen and sports a resolution of 600x1024 pixels, which gives a pixel density of 170 pixels-per-inch (ppi).

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Connectivity is well-catered for with an HDMI output, microUSB port and a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as Bluetooth 2.1 and Wi-Fi.

Acer has wisely chosen not to overlay Android Honeycomb with a dense array of software and interface tweaks, allegedly it uses the Acer user interface (UI) but quite honestly we didn’t notice any major alterations to the standard Honeycomb layout, tools or options.

The only noticeable Acer alterations are a few pre-installed apps, none of them intrude or impact system performance from what we saw, though it has to be said the majority of them weren’t that useful compared to standard Android apps or the vast selection available on Android Market.

That said, one or two of the Acer apps were actually quite neat - Acer offers what is essentially a scrollable ‘drawer’ accessible from a number of separate shortcuts.

The Acer ‘Social’ app, for example, contains shortcuts to Twitter, Facebook and any other social networking apps you have installed.

Scroll across to the side and you’ll be taken to the eBooks screen, also accessible from the ‘eBooks’ app shortcut, where you can access Kindle and other eBook readers you have installed.

It’s the same story for music, video and other multimedia, and it’s nifty because it means you can put these shortcuts on the homescreen and use them as shortcut ‘hubs’ or ‘clusters’ to store related apps in one easy-to-access place.

Best of all, if you want to, you can totally ignore it and use Honeycomb as Google made it – we love having options.

Other notable inclusions are DocsToGo and Adobe Flash Player 10.1.

In terms of performance, the Iconia A100 took pretty much everything we threw at it on the chin – gaming, multitasking, browsing, music, video, YouTube – you name it, not a blink or a stutter.

This is thanks to its dual core ARM Cortex-A9 processor running the NVidia Tegra 2 T20 (Turbo) chipset and clocked at 1GHz. Graphical prowess is delivered by an in-built NVidia ULP GeForce graphics processing unit (GPU) and the onboard 512MB of RAM helps things along too.

For internal storage it carries 8GB of capacity, which is certainly nice to have but some users may find they use this up quickly, thankfully the Iconia A100 supports microSD up to 32GB so you can easily bump up total storage to something bigger.

We subjected the Iconia tablet to some fairly heavy use and noticed that in these conditions the battery charge will drop reasonably quickly, however, leaving it alone or just some light web surfing it’ll easily survive all day on a single charge.

The Iconia A100 features a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera which generates some decent enough snaps and what we particularly liked was the extensive range of camera features, accessible through Honeycomb’s handy and intuitive radial camera display.

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The central button takes a picture and arranged around this are expandable buttons for flash, focus, white balance and the like.

At the bottom are a couple of sliders to switch between onboard and microSD storage for your pics or footage and one for switching between still images and video.

For this last switch flicking between the two will change the central button’s appearance to give you a visual cue to what mode you’re in, the other radial buttons will contextually change too, so the LED flash will change to a LED camera light toggle, for example.

Another button allows you to switch between the rear facing-primary and the front-facing 2-megapixel secondary camera.

Acer’s 7-inch tablet also supports video calling and the front-facing camera integrated nicely with Skype’s app. Video quality isn’t earth-shattering though.

Honeycomb is an impressive system, it’s very nicely presented and on the Iconia A100 performance was flawless.

Customisation is incredibly easy on Honeycomb and highly varied too, you’ve also got a great deal of control over running apps and app switching.

The Google search bar is a nice feature allowing you to search the web and the device from one bar on the home screen, it also features voice search which is unnervingly good at figuring out what you're saying.

We did notice a few things which could do with improving though, one example is the touch keyboard’s close key is infuriatingly near to the number/letter toggle, so frequently we found ourselves cursing at closing the keyboard in the middle of typing.

Apart from this the keyboard was quite easy to use, especially in landscape orientation, and with word-suggestion built in you can type stuff pretty fast.

Browsing is vastly improved from previous builds being much faster and with tabbed browsing, smooth scrolling and pinch zoom, as well as double tap zoom.

We noticed the Iconia A100 took a little longer to load when booting the device than we expected but this didn’t bother us too much, frankly we’d rather have a device take its time on an initial load and then be snappy when running than the other way round.

All in all we found the Iconia A100 a pleasure to use. Sure we have a few minor gripes but on the whole it offers a very rewarding tablet experience.

We found ourselves mainly using it as a highly portable computer for browsing, checking email and playing games round the house, but stick a SIM card in there and it's portable enough to take out into the wider world.

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