Laptop Review-Acer Iconia Tab A510
Article by SmithJames
Acer's new Android tablet, the Iconia Tab A510 ($ 449.99 list), doesn't give you quite enough for your money. The tablet market is insanely competitive: You have to deliver on style, price, or apps to succeed. While the A510 is a decent Android 4.0 tablet with the latest quad-core processor, it's beaten by its competitors in nearly every measure.
Physical DesignIf you're used to the sleek metallic edges of the latest Asus or Toshiba tablets, the A500 will be a bit of a disappointment. At 6.9 by 10.2 by .4 inches (HWD) and 23.5 ounces, it's slightly thicker and heavier than its top competitors. For instance, the Asus Transformer TF300 ($ 399, 4 stars) is just a little slimmer at .38 inches and lighter at 22.2 ounces, and the Asus Transformer Prime ($ 499, 4 stars) is slimmer and lighter still.
But it's not the size that's the issue here. Acer uses a lot of plastic and not much metal in the black-and-silver case without the Acer Laptop Keyboard , leading to a slightly chintzy feel. The mildly textured plastic back is practical, but doesn't feel premium, even when compared to other plastic tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) ($ 249, 4 stars).
The A510s odd-looking MicroUSB jack comes with an adapter that turns it into a full-sized USB port. The tablet supports external USB Acer Laptop Keyboard and storage, as long as that storage is formatted as FAT32. That's pretty hot; it means you can play videos off an external hard drive on this tablet. Asus and Toshiba tablets have that feature too. There's also a built-in mic on top, a rotation lock, and dual speakers on the bottom.
Turn on the Iconia 510 and you get a workaday 1280-by-800-pixel LCD panel, which is absolutely standard on midrange 10-inch tablets. That's on par with the latest models from Asus, Samsung, and Toshiba, although many tablet watchers are holding out for the upcoming 1920-by-1200 models, which will compete more closely with the new Apple iPad's ($ 499, 4.5 stars) 2048-by-1536-pixel screen.
Acer touts its 9800mAh / 36.26W battery as a cure for laptop battery life blues, and we got strong performance with it: 9 hours, 34 minutes of continuous video playback with Wi-Fi on and brightness turned to max. That beat out the 7 hours, 53 minutes we got on the Asus TF300, not to mention the five and a half hours the new iPad achieved.
Android and AppsThe A510 runs Android 4.0.3 with a light skin, Acer's Ring UI. Take a look at our full review of Android 4.0 (4 stars), Ice Cream Sandwich, for more details on the basic OS here.
Pressing a virtual button at the bottom of the screen pops up five quick app shortcuts, a carousel of Web bookmarks, and a volume control. The tablet also comes with a few custom widgets and apps. Acer Print lets you print documents or Web pages to a wide variety of Wi-Fi-enabled printers. Aupeo is a custom radio app. McAfee does antivirus duty, Polaris Office reads Microsoft Of fice documents, and clear.fi is a DLNA media server.
Benchmarks came out looking great, as they generally do on tablets with Nvidia's blazing Tegra 3 processor. Running here at 1.3GHz, the A510 scored faster than the 1.2GHz Asus Transformer Pad TF300T and roughly on par with the original Transformer Prime, which also had a 1.3GHz quad-core processor.
But I encountered strange performance slowdowns when testing the A510. Sometimes on-screen buttons weren't responsive; I found this both on the built-in keyboard not like the Acer Laptop Keyboard and in Zen Pinball. Sometimes screens took an extra moment to render. These issues didn't occur all the time, but they happened often enough to annoy (and to lose some pinball games).
10-inch Android tablets still have a problem with finding good apps in Google Play. As most apps are designed for sma ll phone screens, many prominent apps look pretty awful on large Android tablets. The A510 offers two options to help with this problem: You can download either Tablified Market ($ 1.49, 4 stars), with a list of 1,500 or so top-notch tablet apps, or Nvidia's Tegra Zone, with a few dozen high-quality games designed for Tegra-powered tablets. Those outlets improve the situation, but app availability still falls far short of the Apple iPad, which has over 200,000 third-party apps with UIs designed specifically for tablets. The A510 connects to the Internet using Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n (albeit only on 2.4GHz, not 5GHz). It had no trouble connecting to our WPA2-protected networks. It also supports Bluetooth 2.1. And there's a blocked-off SIM card slot behind a door on the side, a compact keyboard which looks a little like the HP Pavi lion DV6-6000 Keyboarda sloppy touch--either eliminate the slot or make it active.
Laptop Review-Acer Iconia Tab A510
Acer Iconia Tab A510 Unveiled (Tegra 3, Android 4.0 ICS, 10.1 inch, & 5 MP Camera)
