Acer Iconia Tab A100
A smart Android tablet
Acer Iconia Tab A100 is the company’s first 7- inch slate. We’ve been waiting for some time now for this release and now it’s here. This new tablet has many attractive things it comes packed with and it shouldn’t surprise us when we’ll hear it’s a hit. We have tested this tablet and here is our review.
microHDMI port included
So let’s be more specific about this pocket-sized new gadget. The Iconia Tab A100 is a 13.9 ounce tablet covered in shiny plastic on the front and a silver design on the back. The problem with this material it is made of is that it leaves a lot of smudges on both sides, so you’ll most probably have to always carry a handkerchief so bring back the shiny look. It measures 7.7x 4.6x 0.5 inch and is well equipped for connectivity. All it has is lined on the sides, including a 3.5 mm headphone jack, power buttons and the orientation lock switch, as well as the volume buttons. It has a microUSB port for connectivity with PC and a microHDMI port for connecting to an HDTV. The charging is made via a proprietary adapter, leaving the microUSB port free for other uses.
Medium battery life
Being a small tablet, we should expect before this review to find everything else smaller than we’re used to. To begin with, Iconia Tab A100 comes with a smaller battery and we already know the consequences of that. It is smaller than usual, meaning 3060mAh, while most tablets use 4000mAh batteries. This battery offered us entertainment for almost 4 hours, which we can’t even compare to the 6h and 30 minutes offered by the Samsung Galaxy Tab, or what other 10 inch tablets offer.
Small are also the stereo speakers, but they do their job good enough after all. When we tested the sound, we observed some difference from other tablets but not very important. As a matter of fact, if the speakers of Acer Tab A100 don’t so well enough for you, you can always connect your headphones via the headphone jack and enjoy the desired quality.
Another noticeable thing is the reflective screen and can sometimes be quite annoying. The Automatic Brightness settings aren’t also too satisfying but we adjusted them and it looked perfect.
Zoom Mode available
The Acer Iconia Tab A100 runs Android 3.2, which makes it the first of the bunch to run this version. The Android Market is available and with improved functionality for tablet apps. A new feature introduced by the 3.2 version is the Zoom Mode, which works perfectly for a 7- inch screen. Basically, what this app does is to magnify text and images for smaller screens. We tried out this feature and we can say that it works. The empty orange space usually created without this feature disappears and everything looks great.
1 GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor
What we didn’t mention so far is how the Acer Iconia Tab A100 achieves power. Well, as all Honeycomb tablets it has the 1 GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 dual core chipset which makes web pages, games and usual navigation work smooth.
We also wanted to see how the 5 megapixel camera works and it didn’t let us down, for it’s capacity. Both pictures and video recording at 720p HD looked well without major drawbacks. The front camera on the other side did as all 2megapixel cameras do, but for a front camera, it did just as others on the market do.
Test and review conclusions
To end this test and review, the Acer Iconia Tab A100 has many things to offer and is a well built 7 inch tablet that can easily be carried around. It comes preinstalled with a variety of apps, such as NemoPlayer, to handle multimedia files, Docs to Go, Aupeo Internet Radio and Social Jogger, which smartly combines both Twitter and Facebook into one interface. It’s a smart tablet, has a lot of specs and runs latest OS, so this should make many Android fans curious.
Technical specifications and features
| General specifications | 2G Network | N/A |
| Official launch | 2011, February | |
| Device status | Available. Release date 2011, April | |
| Dimensions | External dimensions | 195 x 117 x 13.1 mm |
| Total weight | 470 g | |
| Screen | Type | LCD capacitive touch screen, 16M Available Colours |
| Dimensions | 600 x 1024 pixels, 7.0 inches (~170 ppi pixel density) | |
| Acer UI | ||
| Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate | ||
| Gyro sensor | ||
| Multi-touch input method | ||
| Sound | Alert characteristics | N/A |
| Loudspeaker | Included | |
| 3.5mm jack | Included | |
| Memory | Phone book | Practically unlimited entries and fields |
| Call records | N/A | |
| Internal | 8 GB capacity, 512 MB RAM | |
| Memory card slot | microSD card, up to 32GB, | |
| Data | GPRS | Not included |
| EDGE | Not included | |
| 3G | Not included | |
| WLAN | Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot | |
| Bluetooth | Included, v2.1 with A2DP, EDR | |
| Infrared port | Not included | |
| USB | Included, microUSB v2.0 | |
| Camera specifications | Primary camera | 5 MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels, autofocus, LED flash |
| Video | Included | |
| Secondary | Included, 2 MP | |
| Features | OS | Android OS, v3.0 (Honeycomb), upgradable to v3.2 (September) |
| PROCESSOR | Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, ULP GeForce GPU, Tegra 2 T20 chipset | |
| Radio | Not included | |
| Games | Included | |
| Messaging | Email, Push Email, IM | |
| Internet Browser | HTML | |
| Available Colours | Black | |
| GPS | Not included | |
| Java | Included, via Java MIDP emulator | |
| SNS integration | ||
| HDMI port | ||
| Google Search, Maps, Gmail | ||
| Time management organizer | ||
| Document viewer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) | ||
| XviD/MP4/H.264/H.263 player | ||
| YouTube, Google Talk, Picasa integration | ||
| MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC+ player | ||
| Adobe Flash Player 10.1 | ||
| Predictive text input | ||
| Battery | Standard battery, Li-Po 1530 mAh | |
