Acer Iconia Tab Review

Background

This is meant to be a real-world overview of the Acer Iconia Tab A500.  The focus is more on usability in the world than trying to cover all the speeds and feeds.

Hardware

It would be hard to start the discussion about the hardware without talking about the price.  I bought the Iconia Tab at Target.  With the special Target was running and my Target Red Card, the price was about $375!  This tablet has a generous screen, front and rear facing cameras, excellent performance, Android Honeycomb, etc. Relative to other tablets, the value feels very high.

I have struggled with the pricing on other tablets.  $500 to $800 is just too much for a tablet in my opinion for two reasons. First, look at the price of laptops.  I just bought an amazing Dell laptop for $450 a couple weeks ago.  Why should a tablet cost more than a laptop, in some cases much more?  It just doesn’t make sense from a value standpoint.  Second, tablets are evolving so quickly that the realistic lifetime of these devices is about 2 years.  Given that, who really wants to spend north of $500 for something that will only be used for 2 years?

My impression of the Iconia Tab from a hardware perspective is very favorable.  It is a nice package overall.  The screen is excellent – feels like just about the right size. I would love it if the tablet was smaller and lighter, but it felt very comparable to other tablets of this screen size.  (Thickness and weight will undoubtedly come down in the coming years.)  Performance was very good.  I used it for You Tube videos, email, photos, web surfing, games, etc. and everything was very snappy.  There was not one time where I felt myself waiting for it to do something (excluding downloading things via the Net).

There have been some reviewers who have complained about the battery life of the Iconia Tab, but it seemed quite reasonable to me.  My use case is to be able to use it all evening long and have plenty of juice to spare.  Several nights in a row the family passed the device back and forth on the couch all evening long.  This was real world testing, switching from videos to shopping to games, etc.  I know it isn’t a scientific test, but I find some of the standardized battery tests to be really silly.  At the end of each night, the tablet was still at 80% battery – very good in my book. The only situation where I could see where you might want longer battery life was if you were going to use the tablet all day long without any access to a power plug.  That isn’t a very common scenario for me, but it might be for others.

My only complaint about the hardware, and it is a minor one, is that I found the device a little slippery.  I worry that I might drop it at some point unless I get a carrying case of some sort.

Android Honeycomb

I started the device up and was notified almost immediately that there was a good-sized system update available.  I installed that update and the device was brought up to Android Honeycomb 3.1, the latest version of the Android O/S for tablets.  It was nice to know I was on the latest version!

Overall ease of use of Honeycomb was quite good but there are some challenges for users familiar to Android 2.x.  My best test of ease of use was that when I handed the device to my 10 year old (OK, he ripped it from hands) he got started in about 5 seconds.  He was immediately watching videos, playing games, etc.  Clearly it is not a hard system to use.

My biggest challenges came from things that were different than Android 2.x on a phone.  Who decided to bury the settings button on Honeycomb?  Seriously, those little things can drive people batty, especially if they have mastered how to use an earlier version of your O/S.  Instead of using physical buttons for options, home, etc. like you do on the phone, the tablet uses softkeys.  That took a little getting used to, but worked fine after a short period.

Apps

The biggest challenge for users is going to be that the market for Honeycomb apps is still very early.  The first thing you notice is that some big apps are either not available or are missing key pieces of functionality.  Netflix doesn’t work on this device – that is a huge disappointment.  Skype works, but there is no video calling yet on the Iconia Tab.

While I don’t know the specifics of why Netflix and Skype haven’t released full blown apps on the Iconia Tab, it is becoming clear to a lot of Android developers that Google needs to do a better job of hiding underlying hardware differences from the developers.  At LifePics we are currently wrestling with an issue where some Android devices take photos larger than what Android can handle with its built-in file uploader.  (More on that in a future post.)  When the app developers have to test on all these specific devices, it slows down the whole app development process enormously.  Google, hopefully you are listening. 

A few other apps would download from the Android Market but wouldn’t install. We mostly found this to be the case with some of the games from smaller publishers.

Some other apps worked flawlessly on the tablet even though they are not optimized for tablets.  I tried our own LifePics photo ordering app which we haven’t optimized for Honeycomb tablets yet, and it worked great, but there are certain features that it leaves you wanting for (e.g., the ability to drill down on a photo and see a larger view of it).  Some of those features aren’t really relevant in a smartphone environment but become key on a tablet.

In other cases there were tablet-optimized apps that worked very well. For example, I really like Touchdown by Nitro Desk for access to Exchange email systems.  They have a tablet version of their app that worked flawlessly on the Iconia Tab.

Overall Thoughts

Acer has done their job with this tablet.  They provide a lot of value for the money and the package feels well buttoned-up from a hardware perspective.

More broadly, it is clear that prices are really starting to drop in Android tablets.  When Android tablets hit $299, these devices will become mainstream.  When they go below $199, families will start to own several devices.  However, the app market is still far too immature on Android Honeycomb.  Google needs to help the big app players get their apps out.  By the time the holiday buying season comes around this year, Google really needs the big guys like Netflix, Skype, etc. to FULLY support Honeycomb if it is going to sell in any volume.  If Google doesn’t do that, Apple will continue their dominance in the tablet market through another holiday season.