New Acer Iconia Tab gets Full HD screen

Acer has announced its new Iconia Tab Android tablet, which will be the first to have a Full HD 1,920×1,080 screen.

Currently details are very thin on the ground and the product doesn’t even have an official name yet, with the preview samples we managed to get a look at called just the Iconia Tab. It has been rumoured that this product will launch as the Iconia Tab A700.

Talking to the product specialists at Acer we found out that the new tablet uses the Nvidia Tegra 3 system-on-a-chip and has a quad-core processor. This lets Acer catch up with Asus, which has already released its quad-core tablet, the Eee Pad Transformer Prime.

It’s HD screen and quad-core processor make Acer’s tablet more than a match for the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime.

Acer’s Iconia Tab runs Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), which is Google’s OS designed to unify the tablet and smartphone operating systems. Many existing tablets, including the Eee Pad Transformer Prime, are due upgrades to this OS soon.

We had chance for a quick play with the tablet and the high-resolution screen certainly brings out all of the detail in films and games. We were also told that the Full HD resolution will make the most out of magazines, letting users view them all on screen without having to zoom in to, as is the case with current models.

While publications will fit on the screen, the demonstration we saw using Zinio wasn’t quite so convincing. At the high resolution of the screen, not all text was easy to read, so zooming in is still going to be essential for some publications.

Publications will fit on the tablet’s Full HD screen, but you’ll need to zoom in to make all text readable.

Screen quality seems high, although we only saw the tablet in a dark demonstration rooms. Viewing angles are very good and we could clearly see the on-screen image when the tablet was laid flat on a table. We were told that the panel is “IPS quality”.

“It’s actually made by another company so we can’t call it IPS, but IPS quality,” said the Acer spokesperson. “In fact, it has better colours and contrast than IPS.”

We’ll leave any final judgements on the quality of the tablet until we’ve seen a final product. The Full HD Iconia Tab is due to go on sale Q2 2012, although no pricing has been announced.