Acer Iconia Tab A500 review

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.