• Technology

For most part of this year, the only Android tablet you might have heard of by a long shot was the Samsung Tab. But over the last three months, it seems anyone with half a tech division is launching one. Everyone from iBall to Motorola to companies you never heard of before. You remember the gold rush for the netbooks market? This is the 2011 edition.
One of the companies that led the surge in the netbooks market was Acer, who along with Asus made portable computing available under 20k for the first time in the country. No such luck with the pricing, but Acer has now also joined the tablet wagon with some of its own.
We got our hands on the Acer Iconia A501 last month. What we felt eventually could be best described as mixed. Allow us to elaborate.
First off, the A501 does look very spiffy, with its shiny body that borders on Macbook body material, with a capacitive LCD touch screen that is bordered by a black material. The 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 screen is ultra glossy, which means its collects fingerprints and will make you blind in lit up conditions. But get the viewing angles right, and you have a superb screen that is good enough to watch a HD flick on. Just don’t use it in the sunlight.
The rest of the body is all aluminum and ensconces a front facing camera for those video calls, a back facing 5 megapixel camera (that is just about okay), and twin speakers at lower end on the back. On the sides, the A501 has the 3.5mm headphone jack, the power button, a volume rocker, card slots for the SIM and micro SD card, USB and micro-USB slots, a reset button, a docking connector, and a mini HDMI port. Yes, you heard the last one right. Mini and not a full size one. Plus, you got to get your own cable it seems. That’s a bummer.
Overall, the 10.1-inch tablet looks good. Our only downer with the look and feel is that it does feel a lot heavier than the iPad2. You could say it crams in a lot more too, and that is still only a relative argument. A better one could be that maybe 10-inch tablets are just impossible to make light and able enough for single-handed use. Maybe the whole seven inch rush led by Kindle makes sense.
One the insides and in operation, the A501 performs fairly well. One of the drawbacks of this review is that we do not have another Android tablet to benchmark it against. And we do think the iPad2 is far superior for any Android tablet in the market to lay claim on its space. Nevertheless, the show must go on.
Lets tackle the innards first. The specs that matter are a 1GHz Tegra 2 processor with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, which are very typically Acer-solid. These are very handy specs and it showed in pure review period. The tablet hardly ever crashed out on us. In operation with heavier stuff like games and video, there was no apparent lag or pixel corruption that we could find.
A lot of the smoothness on the A501 must also go to Android 3.0, which is more popularly known as Honeycomb. Again, we do have not reviewed any other version for tablets, so we are unsure how to provide a relative view on this.
As is with most Android devices, it does look like Acer has done some over-the-top customization of its own. Starting off, the homepage on the A501 is not what you would expect on an Android mobile device i.e. it’s just not a tray of apps. Instead, we have small corners or hubs with a couple of things packed in.
For example, the top right-hand corner is where you would find the tap to the full apps menu as well as a plus sign that lets you customize the page. On the left hand side up top, we have a Google search corner with both text and voice search. We must recommend the later by the way as it was pretty (70 percent) accurate for the reviewer’s Delhi-meet-Bandra-meet bad throat accent. The bottom part of the screen also houses some more navigational tools. On the left corner, you have the back, home and recent icons, which change orientation as you navigate on. For example, when you tap recent, the back icon turns to a down icon to close that apps tray for you. The other corner is much simpler with just informational stuff like battery life and notifications.
So what we like from the interface is actually the notifications bit, which we do miss on the iPad. We are told that iOS 5 fixes this bit but we are yet to review that. What we do not like with the interface is the slightly convoluted way around menus. We would like apps to be the centerpiece of our tablet, and as such need one tap or max two taps to reach the app we want. Here, it is easy to lose your self in the question of which way to go.
Native apps on the A501 play nice with you, and it helps that we are all on Google for most of our day-to-day stuff. Browser is strictly okay for us. Social integration does seem to be lagging behind on this and somehow it does not feel as polished as the iPad. But this seems like a product still feeling its way around the interface. Expect more tweaks as we go on. For heavy users of e-mail and document processing software, we would say the A501 is pretty good with its large 10-inch screen. Any less, and the professionals and entrepreneurs out there would simply not use it for work. Thankfully, the onboard keyboard on the A501 is well spaced out and the icons are pretty large to type. We are okay with not downloading any other keyboard.
The thing that irritated us most about the A501 is the battery life. We are decent media consumers on our tablets, heavy on games and apps. And we were unable to get more than six hours at a time from this tablet when on Wi-Fi. On 3G, we could do a little better, but then we all know about how good 3G is in India.

Hit or miss?
The A501 has many things we like, the first that it is 3G enabled. We certainly think that no matter the data networks, going Wi-Fi only with tablets is just daft. Good on Acer coming out with this version along with the Wi-Fi only model. We also like the interface, though we do have some navigational issues. We like the look, the specs, and we think it is enterprise worthy to an extent even as apps for business and productivity are limited compared to an iPad.
Things we don’t like include the battery life, the weight, and also the somewhat unpolished finish to Honeycomb. But what we do not like most is the high price point that it is being retailed at. By hook or more hooks, Acer must find a way to price it lower. Else it has no chance against an iPad, which in any case outslugs Android tablets on content for consumption. Why, given the cheap Chinese imports, you could probably find similar tablets under 20k soon i.e. they will do to Acer what it did to others during the netbook rush.

Tags:
Acer Iconia A501, Android tablet, MacBook, netbook, Samsung Tab