Acer Iconia Tab A110 quad-core 7 inch tablet coming Oct 30th for $230

The Acer Iconia Tab is a 7 inch tablet with an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean software, and a $229.99 price tag. While Acer has been showing off the tablet for a while, the company has now announced it will go on sale in the US and Canada starting October 30th.

Acer Iconia Tab A110

Acer’s latest 7 inch tablet has 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and a 7.5 hour battery. That all seems pretty good for a $230 inch tablet — until you consider the fact that you can pick up a Google Nexus 7 with the same features for $199.

The Nexus 7 also has a higher resolution 1280 x 800 pixel display. The Acer Iconia Tab A110 has a 1024 x 600 pixel screen.

But Acer’s tablet does have a few things that Google’s does not. That includes a microSD card slot for up to 32GB of additional storage and a microHDMI port for connecting a TV or monitor. I suppose those features might be worth an extra $30 to some people.

The Iconia Tab also features WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, and a 2MP front-facing camera.

Posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2012, 8:00 am by Brad Linder | 10 Comments

http://twitter.com/stevejk Steven King

I’m not sure if a microSD slot itself costs $30, but certainly not the cost difference between a low-res display plus microSD and a high-res display.

If it had the same res display plus a microSD slot for $30 more, I’d get it no question. But choosing between a high-res display vs microSD slot, that is a tough one.
sracer

I am fascinated by the overwhelming praise for the Nexus 7. It seems as if raw specs are the only thing that matters. Usability/flexibility seem to be far lower on the priority list when considering the N7.

The fact that it shipped with the UI in “phone mode” rather than “tablet mode” seems to have been largely ignored. The various Rube Goldberg workarounds to get access to removable storage don’t appear to be a big deal either. Lack of output to external displays doesn’t seem to be an issue either.

The Nexus 7 is a solid tablet, but I fail to see how it is the standard bearer for 7″ Android tablets that every other tab must be compared to.

As for the Acer, it looks like a nice device too. The inclusion of microSD slot and HDMI-out are two pluses. It is a bit simplistic to judge a tablet’s screen solely by the number of pixels. Aspect ratio, pixel density, viewing angle, vibrancy, contrast, uniformity, etc. are all very important. (though everything being equal, more pixels are better)

I’d like to see how the Acer stacks up against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0.
JFLJ

The HDMI output is important for those of us who use tablets for PowerPoint presentations. With a $20 adapter, a lightweight tablet can substitute for a much heavier notebook. Documents to go does a fairly good job with PowerPoint presentations unless they use a font that does not translate well (such as Arial Narrow) or embedded Excel charts including x-y curves “with data points linked by smoothed lines.”
California Bob

Best Buy will sell it for $199. The cheap Chinese tablets were a warning shot, but with Acer entering the market with this, the race to the bottom has begun. Adding the SD slot and HDMI ports is key. Amazon, Google, and Apple have great products, but they lock you into their “roach motels” to make you buy only their products or view their ads.
http://rationaldreaming.com/ Mike

That’s true of Amazon and Apple (though you can buy apps from anyone they have in their stores), but certainly not for Google. Yes, they feature the Play store prominently, but you can easily install other sources of apps, and there is no requirement to use any of their built-in services either. Yes, Nexus 7 does push you in their direction, but whether you decide to go there is entirely up to you.
http://rationaldreaming.com/ Mike

HDMI will probably be added to the next Nexus tablet, mostly because more people will want to connect them to their TVs for their media content (and because the new Kindles have it). Business users are no doubt a consideration, but I suspect most low-end manufacturers aren’t really focusing on that.
http://rationaldreaming.com/ Mike

There are plenty of good reasons why the Nexus 7 merits the role of standard bearer:

– they were the first of the next-gen 7-inch tablets (quad core, HD, etc)
– it was the first Jelly Bean tablet
– it’s from Google. They make Android.
– Nexus 7 will get all Android updates first and likely for longer than the competition.
– The stated goal of Google for the Nexus 7 was to be the standard bearer for low-cost quality Android tablets for others to follow — a reference design, in many respects.
– It is still the best performing, best spec’ed tablet at the $200 price point that isn’t locked down by the manufacturer.

So, yeah, there are plenty of reasons why people keep comparing new tablets with the Nexus 7, and they probably will continue to do. The fact that Acer cannot match the Nexus specs and price point shows that it’s still not easy to build a low cost quality tablet.

(Note: there was plenty of criticism of the portrait-only mode of the N7 — enough to push Google into back tracking almost immediately. In any case, there were always free software fixes available, which is why many reviewers didn’t make a big fuss.)

Regarding the new Acer, this article isn’t a review. There will be plenty of those in the weeks to come, and we’ll have more than enough info to make an informed purchase.
California Bob

As I (and others) have already said, it’s also true for Google that there is no HDMI or microSD, even though the ARM chips and the linux kernel have built-in support for these standard features. Ask yourself why they did that and you may understand why they are like Amazon and Apple with their walled-gardens. I think Google has made a useful contribution with the touch-screen interface, but compare the way they’ve handled the business end of that to other developers who base their designs on the Linux kernel. What happened to “do no evil?”
http://rationaldreaming.com/ Mike

Well, of course they want people to use their cloud services — that’s how they make their money. But unlike the Fire, Nook, and IPad, Google ships with a vanilla operating system which, by default, provides an online store (and repository of thousands of free apps and utilities) that they administer with a very light touch.

The fact there is no HDMI on the Nexus is nothing to do with locking down the device, and in retrospect, now that the new Fires have one, they may be regretting that decision, just as they were caught napping with 8GB/16GB storage rather than 16GB/32GB models.

Yes, the lack of microSD was a turn off for some, but Google isn’t trying to placate the hackers and techies (who are a tiny fraction of their target audience), they are trying to sell millions of these tablets to those who just want a tablet for consuming media, for which the Nexus 7 is amply suited (well, once they ditch the 8GB version).

Google isn’t perfect by any means, but I fail to see how they have acted in an evil fashion by releasing a state-of-the-art 7-inch tablet at an affordable price.
buzz86us

i think i will stick with my nook color and touchpad for a bit longer until the next nexus 7 that is thinner and lighter.

Acer Iconia Tab A110 quad-core 7 inch tablet coming Oct 30th for $230

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