The Acer Iconia Tab A100 is the first 7 inch tablet running Google Android 3.2 Honeycomb to go on sale in the US. The little tablet launched last month, and it’s available for about $330.
That price is a bit higher than what you’ll pay for upcoming budget tablets from Lenovo and ViewSonic, but at $330, the A100 is still one of the cheapest Honeycomb tablets on the market.
Yet the only biggest difference between this little tablet and other Honeycomb devices are the smaller screen and the lower display resolution. While most Honeycomb tablets so far have featured 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel displays, the Acer Iconia Tab A100 has a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel screen.
It’s also smaller and lighter than its 10 inch peers, weighing about 0.92 pounds and fitting comfortably in one hand for reading a book, surfing the web, or watching a video. Unfortunately it also has a relatively small 1530mAh battery. Acer says you should get up to 5 hours of web browsing time or 4.5 hours of video playback time from the tablet. Many of its larger peers get close two twice that amount of battery life.
The tablet has a capacitive touchscreen display, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, 1GB of RAM, and a 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processor. A model with 8GB of memory is available for $329.99, while a 16GB model runs $349.99.
Honeycomb looks pretty good on the small screen, and I’m fast becoming a fan of devices with 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel displays. Any more pixels would likely be overkill, but at this resolution graphics look much sharper, and web pages look much better than on devices with lower resolution 7 inch, 800 x 480 pixel displays.
I really, really like my A100. There are some issues: audio “leaks” when headphones plugged in sometimes (????), and the Home button is “too” convenient – I’ve dropped out of what I was doing several times due to accidentally touching it. Other than that, I can’t think of anything not to love about it! Yes, battery life is less than optimum, but I never use it for that long at a time, and it charges up really fast. The WiFi is effortless. The graphics are great. Smooth sailing with this little guy!
I am using the A100 since August 20th. I need and like the 7 inch screen; 10 inch sreen is to big for me to want to carry around. My a100 is fast…I use it in Real Estate. It is for me; I do not care if 8 people cannot view the screen at once, that is not what I need it for. The 4+ hours of user time is more than adequate because a thirty minute to one hour charge takes my A100 to 100% charge; and a charge at night last the day: it is not in use 4 straight hours with no car charge or plug in. I do not play games with it; I do not need it for Youtube full length movies! I use it for business and it is nothing shy of awsome! So I check weather, stocks, news, traffic, new listings, property owner information…Did I forget to mention I simply teather it to my Nexus S…
When I take the A100 out of standby, it picks up my WIFI hotspot automatically and I am on a web page in 10 seconds, and it tells me of other open WIFI spots if i ask…PDF yes, Flash 10.3 yes. Turn on from powered down in 30 seconds,…A100 defines productivity!