Pros
Works well with many Android apps. Great multimedia features.
Cons
Short battery life. Bloatware. A bit chintzy-looking.
Bottom Line
The Acer Iconia Tab A100 works well with more of Android's 200,000 apps than other tablets do; we just wish we could play with it longer on a single charge.
The sweetest Honeycomb tablet we've seen so far packs modern Android goodness into a pocket-sized package, with a new OS version going far to solve Android tablets' biggest problem to date: the lack of decent tablet-sepcific apps. But the 7-inch Acer Iconia Tab A100's petite form means a too-small battery. Alas, though we're giving this great little tablet a strong recommendation, its battery woes keep it from attaining Editors' Choice status.
The Wi-Fi-only Acer Iconia Tab A100 costs $329.99 for an 8GB model and $349.99 for a 16GB unit, putting it in the middle of the 7-inch tablet realm between cheapo models like the Coby Kyros ($199, 2 stars) and the HTC Flyer ($499, 3.5 stars) and BlackBerry PlayBook ($499, 2.5 stars). There's no plan for this to be picked up by a U.S. 3G carrier, unlike its brother the Iconia A501, which will be coming out from AT&T.
Physical Features, Networking and Battery Life
Acer isn't a king of industrial design, and the Iconia Tab A100 is a bit of a clunker when it comes to looks. That's OK though; this tablet has a lot of other things going for it. The Iconia Tab A100 is a 7.7-by-4.6-by-0.5-inch (HWD), 13.9-ounce tablet made of shiny plastic with a cheap-looking silver design on its blue-gray back. Both the front and back feel a little greasy, and tend to attract fingerprints. The tablet has a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack, Volume buttons, an Orientation Lock switch, a Power button, and a bunch of ports on the bottom. It charges from a proprietary adapter rather than a standard micro USB connection, but it also has a micro USB port to connect to PCs, and a micro HDMI port to hook the tablet up to an HDTV.
Switch the tablet on and you'll see a 1024-by-600 touch-screen LCD of average brightness. At its Automatic Brightness setting it's noticeably dim and the screen is too reflective, but pump up the brightness and it looks great. The stereo speakers on the bottom are loud enough to get their point across, but they're tinny, just like all other tablet speakers. I got much better sound through the headphone jack and over a pair of stereo Bluetooth headphones. Acer advertises 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi here, but we couldn't find any of our 5GHz Wi-Fi networks with this tablet, though connecting to 2.4GHz networks was simple.
Curiously, the Iconia A100 also has a blocked SIM card slot, although the slot is mentioned in the tablet's quick start guide. This is a lost opportunity, as I'd love to have the option to pair the A100 with an AT&T prepaid tablet plan.
The Iconia A100's Achilles heel, and the reason it isn't getting an Editors' Choice nod, is its poor battery life, thanks to a smaller-than-usual 3060mAh battery. (Most tablets have 4000mAh or larger batteries.) We only got 3 hours, 53 minutes of video playback on a charge, not enough for a cross-country flight. In the 7-inch tablet realm, that compares poorly to the 8 hours, 15 minutes we got from the BlackBerry PlayBook, or the 6 hours, 32 minutes from the Samsung Galaxy Tab ($399, 3.5 stars). It's also less than we see on most 10-inch tablets, such as the Apple iPad 2 ($499, 4.5 stars), which lasted 7 hours, 30 minutes.
Android and Apps
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| The Acer Iconia Tab A100 is the first tablet to bring Google's Android Honeycomb operating system to a more pocketable 7-inch screen size. |
Android 3.2's major new feature is Zoom Mode, which convinces phone apps that they're running on a smaller phone screen and magnifies text and images rather than filling in chunks of the screen with blank space. This won't be great for 10-inch tablets; as we've seen on the iPad, apps designed for 3.5-inch screens and scaled up can still look very grainy on a 10-inch screen.
But it's kind of wonderful on a 7-inch device, which is just small enough that the scaling still looks usable. I tried the Conan O'Brien Team Coco app, which looks awful on most tablets. In Standard mode, it's an ugly list with too much empty orange space on the right side of the screen. In Zoomed mode, it's tight and good-looking.
This isn't a panacea, not by a long shot. Google still needs to fix the Android market so tablet owners can easily get tablet-specific apps, and until that happens, Android tablets will have a huge disadvantage against the iPad. But it's better than the experience on any other Android tablet so far.
The app-scaling feature is Android 3.2's major new innovation, so for the rest of the Honeycomb package, check out our original review of the Honeycomb OS.
Performancewise, the Iconia A100 has the same 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core chipset as every other Honeycomb tablet, and benchmark results are very similar. High-end games such as Galaxy on Fire 2 played smoothly and Web pages, even with Flash, loaded promptly and showed their content well.
Acer hasn't skinned Android per se, but it's added a whole bunch of its own apps to the Iconia Tab. They're useful enough, but there are better alternatives for all of them, and I wish I had the option to throw them away for my own choices.
The nemoPlayer media player makes it easier to browse your videos than the standard Android gallery, thanks to large thumbnails. MusicA is a cheap Shazam ripoff. Aupeo is a Pandora clone. SocialJogger is a somewhat awkward Twitter/Facebook client. Movie Studio is a basic movie editor. Hardwod Solitaire is the best-looking Solitaire game you've ever seen. Acer's Planner is an alternative home screen with news and email widgets, and Clear.fi is a client for DLNA, the incomprehensible networking system that lets a small number of very adept techies share media between their PCs, tablets, and TVs. Again, these apps cannot be uninstalled.
One thing falls flat here: The Iconia A100 doesn't have a traditional USB mass storage mode, and it's totally incompatible with Macs. To plug it into a Windows PC, you have to download Acer's clunky Acer Sync software, after which the Tab appears as a drive you can drag and drop to. Acer Sync also purports to sync your Outlook data with your tablet, but I couldn't get that part of the software to find my tablet.
Multimedia and Conclusions
The Iconia A100 is a great little multimedia tablet, thanks to its easy HDMI output and removable memory card slot. The tablet comes with either 8GB or 16GB of built-in memory, and supports up to 32GB MicroSD cards tucked into a convenient slot on the side.
The tablet handled all of our test files with aplomb: MPEG4, H.264, WMV, XVID and DIVX videos up to 1080p resolution played with no problem, and MP3, AAC, WMA and OGG music was loud and clear. The tablet has a standard Micro-HDMI port that plugs directly into any HDMI-enabled TV and mirrors the tablet's screen, so that anything on the screen - even streaming video - shows up on the TV. The tablet outputs 720p rather than 1080p resolution, though, so 1080p files don't show on the TV in full quality.
There's also a docking port on the bottom, which works with a $79.99 desktop dock. The dock really only adds one thing, the ability to use an included infrared remote to control the tablet's media player when it's hooked up to a TV. It's only worth it if you're hooking the tablet up to your TV a lot.
The Iconia Tab has two cameras, a 2-megapixel unit on the front and a 5-megapixel one on the back. The front camera worked very well with Google Talk video chat. The back camera isn't quite state-of-the-art: It had a bit more autofocus delay than I like, at 1.1 seconds, and its 5-megapixel images were stippled with color noise. But it captured smooth 720p high-def videos at 30 frames per second, and really, you don't buy a tablet for the camera. Tablet cameras are a little awkward to use in the first place (though at least 7-inch tablets are less awkward to hold up than 10-inch models.)
Maybe seven inches is the perfect size for an Android tablet. 10-inch Honeycomb tablets inevitably invite comparisons to the iPad, with its far superior app library. But at seven inches, a bunch of interesting things happen: The tablet becomes more portable, it goes where iPads can never go (like in a coat pocket), and the huge catalog of Android phone apps scales better.
Other 7-inch Android tablets run Android 2.2 or 2.3, phone OSes designed for 4-inch screens that look and feel awkward on a larger device. Even Google has said that Android 2.2 isn't ideal for a tablet. The Iconia A100's Android 3.2, on the other hand, has all of the good-looking UI embellishments of higher-end devices like the Motorola Xoom ($599, 3.5 stars) in a pocket-sized package.
The Iconia also feels more feature-complete than the BlackBerry PlayBook, a major non-Android 7-inch rival. The PlayBook still has some gaping holes, most notably in its lack of e-mail support. The Iconia comes out of the box doing everything you expect it to.
The Acer Iconia A100 is one of our favorite tablets so far. It's great for watching movies, video chatting, surfing the Web and playing with apps, until its teeny-tiny battery runs out. If it weren't for that battery life result, this would be an absolute Editors' Choice for Android tablets. For now, it's just the sweetest slice of Honeycomb we've seen yet.
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