Acer Iconia Tab A200
A new Android tablet is on the market
The money you have to pay to own a tablet is seriously way overrated. So many of them are overpriced. Sure, they offer, most of the time, a good performance and all that. But in the end, it doesn’t really justify the price. So thank you manufacturers who make affordable tablets. Today we’ll give our thanks to Acer and its Iconia Tab A200. Paying only $349 on this gadget will make your day. And we even test it and wrote a review about it. Wanna see?
Unchanged design
This is Acer’s second tablet to come with an Android OS. The design is taken from the A500 version, but much improved. The earliest model wasn’t that solid; this one thankfully is. Even if it costs less, the Iconia Tab A200 is the elegant one of the two. It doesn’t have the lightest or slimmest bodies in the industry – in fact, it’s a rather heavy gadget -, but it has a very clean look. You’d be hard put to find a tablet with smoother angles and rounder edges. The fact that it features plastic on the rear makes it easier to hold in your hands. The weight we mentioned a bit earlier is actually useful; it makes room for a USB 2.0 port. We liked the many options for connecting other devices. But we sure as heck didn’t like the controls for volume on top of the Tab A200.
The plastic used on the front is glossy. So fingerprints maniacs, prepare to be annoyed. Chatting with friends won’t be as frustrating as it was on the older model. That’s because the camera is placed above the screen, not in the upper left-hand corner. Fingerprints won’t attack the rear, thanks to the soft-touch titanium. All the other tablets in its range have a cam on the back; ours doesn’t.
Just Honeycomb OS
The measurements of the A200′s display are good. Viewing angles aren’t. The display offered quick responses and an overall nice performance. It could have been much better, but the difficulty to read it outside on a sunny day prevented that. And brightness wasn’t the best. The interface is still stuck on Android’s Honeycomb; the upgrade will happen in the middle of this month. But hold your horses: there’s nothing wrong with this one. Menus are perfectly easy to access.
The way to write something on this tablet is with its keyboard. You don’t say? Yes, well, we need to, because typing was quite a treat. In both the portrait and landscape modes. The XT9 Text Input was our favorite. The only inconvenience was how we had to change to another keyboard; all that hassle to be able to use numbers and punctuation marks. The Iconia Tab A200 has no Swype, which would have made typing faster in our tests for this review.
Multitasking capabilities
The sound was either good or bad. Some of the songs we listened were delivered with great quality; others lacked a certain spark in quality. Applications are plentiful, among them Google’s services. They are very good for wasting time in a boring situation.
The power given by the processor is worthy of Acer. Not many tablets can let you listen to some music, play a game and surf the Internet at the same time. Juggling apps and documents was fast and precise. Scrolling didn’t freeze. Photos and videos you might take and shoot don’t have the best quality. 6 hours and a half was all the battery life.
Review conclusion
Acer’s Iconia Tab A200 won’t bedazzle you with stellar design, performance, features and specs. But for the low price it has, it can do quite a lot of things well.
