Acer Iconia Tab A500 review

Updated 24/05 with battery life scores

Acer’s Iconia Tab A500 was just one among many contenders to Apple’s tablet crown at Mobile World Congress back in January. Some, such as the much-hyped Motorola Xoom, failed to impress, and even the excellent Asus Eee pad Transformer couldn’t manage to topple the mighty Apple iPad 2. So does the A500 stand a chance?

The first thing you’ll probably notice is the price. We have to say we’re surprised that a company like Acer, which is best known for its competitively priced laptops, has chosen to go head-to-head with Apple on pricing. If you shop about, you can pick up the A500 for £436, compared to £479 for an equivalent 32GB iPad. It’s not a big saving, especially when you consider that an Acer laptop often costs a fraction of the price of a MacBook.

That said, Acer hasn’t cut many corners when it comes to the A500’s design. OK, so its chassis isn’t aluminium, but it still feels very sturdy and looks rather smart. The silver-grey back, numerous handy ports and obvious camera and speaker placement give it a more functional-looking design than the minimalist iPad 2.

Its high-tech appearance chimes well with the Android operating system’s own sci-fi stylings. Acer has, wisely, done very little to the standard Honeycomb 3.0 installation. The background honeycomb comes in green by default to match Acer’s logo, and there’s a smattering of extra shortcuts on the main page, which link to additional home pages of apps labelled GameZone, Multimedia, Social and eReading. All the shortcuts can be deleted in the usual way and the additional pages of shortcuts seem unnecessary.

The rounded off corners and edges make it comfortable to hold, but a weight of 765g makes it the heaviest of the new generation of Honeycomb tablets. It’s 85g heavier than the Asus Transformer, despite being pretty much the same size. Sat in your lap this isn’t a problem, but you won’t want to hold it in one hand for very long. That’s not unusual for 10in tablets, but it’s surprising how much heavier this feels than the iPad 2.

As with all the latest Android tablets, Acer has opted for a 10.1in widescreen display with a 1,280×800 resolution. This gives you more screen space and more pixels than the iPad 2. Surprisingly, though, the A500 comes with a bog-standard TFT display, rather than a superior IPS panel. The screen here isn’t bad, but the viewing angles do suffer in comparison with the Eee Pad Transformer and iPad, and colours aren’t quite as vibrant. We also noticed that it was rather heavy handed in its automatic brightness adjustment, with distracting jumps in the level, rather than smooth adjustments.

On the left-hand side of the A500, holding it in portrait mode, there’s the power button, headphone port and micro HDMI output – with the latter providing Full HD video output.

On the right are the power socket and two USB ports (that sticker peels off easily by the way). You have to charge using the power socket, with no trickle charge via the micro USB port on offer; that port is reserved then for connecting your A500 to your PC for syncing and transferring files. In a very practical move, Acer has also supplied a full-sized USB host port, so you can attach USB memory sticks (or a memory card reader or digital camera) to the tablet and transfer files directly – quite handy if you’re on the go and want to touch-up or upload photos.

A volume rocker and small rotation-lock switch are positioned on the top edge to the left. Next to these is a flap that hides the memory card slot, which takes micro SDHC cards to expand the 32GB of onboard storage already provided. Here also is where you’d fit a full-sized SIM card if you had the 3G capable A501 variant. As with the iPad 2, this adds a fairly steep £100 to the asking price, plus of course any monthly costs you incur from an additional data contract. Smartphone users, who want occasional 3G use from their tablet, will be better off using their phones as mobile hotspots and tethering their tablet via Wi-Fi. Speaking of which, the A500 comes with the usual 802.11b/g/n capability plus Bluetooth.

We weren’t terribly impressed with pictures or video from the built-in 5-megapixel camera, colours were a bit muted and detail was minimal, pretty standard smartphone camera fare. The speakers, however, are far better and louder than most, the inclusion of Dolby Mobile makes the best of them, helping to keep volume levels high without distortion, and beefing up the lower mid-range in the absence of any real bass. If you want better audio performance for music then the docking connector on the bottom is compatible with a docking station, which has an audio output and remote control.

The A500 uses the same Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset as the Asus Transformer, with the processor cores running at the same 1GHz. And it comes with the same 1GB of RAM. This should make it quicker once you’ve got a lot of apps loaded into memory, though we can’t say we really noticed the difference. In our benchmarks it was quicker in the Quadrant 3D benchmark with a score of 2,385 – compared to 2,146 for the Transformer. While in the SunSpider Javascript benchmark it completed the test in 2,016ms, inexplicably slower than the Transformer’s 1,878ms. That said, we thought that page rotation seemed a touch sluggish compared to the Asus tablet, and neither can compare to the smoothness of the iPad 2 (though its browser doesn’t have to deal with flash content, remember).

Being heavier, we surmised the A500 might have a bigger battery than the Asus Transformer, which managed 8 hours and 37 minutes of continuous video playback. It didn’t disappoint, lasting for ten hours and 21 minutes, the best score we’ve seen for an Android 3.0 tablet – though still well short of the eighteen hours of the iPad 2.

The A500 isn’t a bad tablet, it feels well-made, has plenty of useful ports, good speakers and decent application and battery performance. However, it’s a little heavier than it need be, and the display isn’t up to that of its immediate competitors – both key considerations. The A500 simply feels like a slightly cheaper device than its immediate competitors. Despite this, it costs around £50 more than the 16GB Asus Eee pad Transformer. The extra memory is a bit of a moot point, as you can always pick up a 16GB micro SDHC card for around £15 if you really need extra storage for media files.

We’ve given the A500 four stars, as it’s not far behind its competition, but that said, we can’t see any reason to buy it at its current price.