Thread: Acer Iconia Tab A5oo

Android had released the Hon*eycomb opera~ing system sometIme earlier this year as an as meant for the tablet product cate*gory. Sporting this as, Acer's leonia Tab ASOO has reached the Indian market, and even before Motorola Mobility got Xoom here .. Google built the Honey*comb user interface from the ground up and it looks nothing like its smartphone cousins. The display is divided into five home screens. It houses the NVIDIA Tegra 2 system on chip with a snappy 1 GHz dual-core processor. Navigating through the home screens is breezy and long holding a particular home screen will give you a zoomed out view of the five home screens with options to add more widgets, applications and wallpapers, among other things to the screens via a simple drag-and*drop mechanism.

You will notice apps placed in a drawer section on the home page, which houses related applications. There's Multimedia, Social, eReading and GameZone which are the broad ca tego*ries and you will have related applications such as audio j video player apps under Multimedia, Lumiread and the Browser under eReading and so on. With the help of a round button housing the plus sign, you can add extra applications under each section. This functionality is somewhat similar to the Folder function in the iOS, except that in the Honeycomb as, you do not have the ability to name the folder. Visually though it looks much better than the Folder implementation on the iOS, but then again, it just adds more clicks needed to get into a particular application. The settings menu is quite exhaustive with an additional option called Dolby Mobile. You'll notice apps placed in a drawer section on the homepage, which houses related appli*cations. There's Multimedia, Social, eReading and GameZone as broad categories.




The leonia ASOO has an LCD screen which was a huge let*down. The picture quality and brightness levels are good, but the colour accuracy is debatable as we found a heavy bluish cast on the screen. The on-board; MP camera is quite okay [ . casual shooting in outd( . conditions. Shots taken indoor were noisy. Video shooting poor with jerky videos an: there's no option to zoom inor out while live shooting. HOI\ ever, we liked the implementa· tion of camera functionalitiesin the rotary dial sort of a way.Th Acer leonia Tab A500 lasted a good two days on full charge. with regular surfing on Wi·Fi. watching You Tube videos, push email, listening to music. gaming and reading ebooks.

The onscreen keypad is great to type on in both the landscape and portrait mode. In the landscape mode, you will not be able to type com· fortably with your thumb, so you will end up using one hand to hold the tablet and the other to type. Holding the tablet in the portrait mode allows easy typing, but your as the keypad is located in the bottom, bal*ancing the tablet while speedy typing is an issue. The Acer leonia Tab A500 has a good underlyi ng software coupled with decent hardware. But we think the display can be improved. The user inter· face of the Honeycomb OS and its response is great.