There is a new showstopper in town. Acer has just launched a tablet that can make the most luxe of tablets stare in admiration. The Iconia's looks are inspired by Acer's Timeline series of notebooks—brushed aluminium back and dark grey plastic running along the sides. The front has al 0.1 -inch screen running edge to edge. On the sides are located the power, volume and screen orientation lock keys along with a couple of ports such as Micro HDMI and USB. Yes, unlike most tablets, the Iconia A500 has a USB port that eases connection to a memory drive. It can also connect a USB keyboard in case you do not want to use the virtual one.
What, however, brings this tablet to life is an excellent 1280 x 800 resolution touch screen. The Iconia A500 runs on the latest Android Honeycomb OS and is powered by NVIDIA's 1 GHz dual core Tegra processor. Users get five front panels that can hold preferred program icons or widgets. More of these can be downloaded from the Android or Acer app stores. Acer has also added its own interface, which sorts various applications under different heads like social, games and multimedia. Three hi-def games, including Need for Speeds Golf, are included. The tablet sports two speakers at the back, while a good pair of headphones is part of the package.
The Iconia A500 has a 5 MP camera with flash at the back and a 2 MP camera in the front that facilitates video chats. And while Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are active on this tablet, 3G, sadly, is not. But if you flip over the memory card slot cover you will see a covered stump of what possibly will become a SIM slot in another version. Either that or Acer decided against 3G connectivity at the last minute. We ran some HD 720p movies on the system and it didn't do too badly. The frame rate dropped in high paced action sequences but nothing that would kill the fun. The 480p movies run the best. But you will need to convert other video files to MP4 or 3GP if you want to run them on the Iconia tab. (We recommend Yamb 2.1, a free application for Windows that can convert most video formats to MP4.) At the end, we have to say that the Iconia A55 impressed us a lot.
