There have been plenty of great
Android based
tablet released over the past few month and there are many more in the works ready for the rest of the year, but they have all seemed to be slightly compromised in one respect or another.
The Xoom is a great
tablet on paper, but it’s price and buggy performance (the price for being the first
Honeycomb tablet available?) have put a lot of consumers off.
The range of
Samsung Tablets all have great hardware specs too, but again those prices but them way above the entry level
iPad 2 and at nearly double the price of the original
iPad.
What we need is a
tablet which not only undercuts the
iPad on price, but also blows it’s
specification our of the water!
Enter the
Acer Iconia A500 Honeycomb
tablet.
Acer don’t mess around, when they see a niche
market they latch on. They were one of the undisputed kings of the netbook market, and if the Iconia is anything to go by they’ll also be on top in
tablet town.
First things first. The A500 costs $450 for the base 16Gb model, thats $50 less than the iPad 2 and $150 less than the Wifi only Motorola Xoom (although the Xoom get’s 32Gb). In the eyes of today’s budget minded consumer those savings will look very attractive.
Now take a look at the
specifications:
10.1 inch capitative screen, 1Gb DDR2 RAM, 2 mega-pixel web cam (front), 5 mega-pixel rear camera with auto focus and LED flash, 1Ghz CPU, 16Gb Nand Flash memory with SD card reader, plus all the usual Android
tablet features such as USB 2.0, Wifi and Bluetooth! Oh and of course Android 3.0 Honeycomb!
Pretty impressive hey! More so when you take in to account that those are the exact same
features and
specifications offered on the more costly Xoom, and that the
cameras on the
Acer tablet make the
cameras on the
iPad 2 look like Fisher Price toys!
The Acer Iconia A500 is shaping up to be one hell of an Android tablet and Best Buy, the vendors of the A500 have already reported huge pre-orders for the device.
While we haven’t managed to have a play on a A500 yet, just from the price and specification alone our credit cards are feeling a little itchy!
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