Acer’s new Android tablet, the Iconia Tab A510 ($449.99 list), doesn’t give you quite enough for your money. the tablet market is insanely competitive: You have to deliver on style, price, or apps to succeed. while the A510 is a decent Android 4.0 tablet with the latest quad-core processor, it’s beaten by its competitors in nearly every measure.
Physical DesignIf you’re used to the sleek metallic edges of the latest Asus or Toshiba tablets, the A500 will be a bit of a disappointment. At 6.9 by 10.2 by .4 inches (HWD) and 23.5 ounces, it’s slightly thicker and heavier than its top competitors. For instance, the Asus Transformer TF300 ($399, 4 stars) is just a little slimmer at .38 inches and lighter at 22.2 ounces, and the Asus Transformer Prime ($499, 4 stars) is slimmer and lighter still.
But it’s not the size that’s the issue here. Acer uses a lot of plastic and not much metal in the black-and-silver case, leading to a slightly chintzy feel. the mildly textured plastic back is practical, but doesn’t feel premium, even when compared to other plastic tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) ($249, 4 stars).
The A510′s odd-looking MicroUSB jack comes with an adapter that turns it into a full-sized USB port. the tablet supports external USB keyboards and storage, as long as that storage is formatted as FAT32. That’s pretty hot; it means you can play videos off an external hard drive on this tablet. Asus and Toshiba tablets have that feature too. There’s also a built-in mic on top, a rotation lock, and dual speakers on the bottom.
Turn on the Iconia 510 and you get a workaday 1280-by-800-pixel LCD panel, which is absolutely standard on midrange 10-inch tablets. That’s on par with the latest models from Asus, Samsung, and Toshiba, although many tablet watchers are holding out for the upcoming 1920-by-1200 models, which will compete more closely with the new Apple iPad‘s ($499, 4.5 stars) 2048-by-1536-pixel screen.
Acer touts its 9800mAh / 36.26W battery as a cure for battery-life blues, and we got strong performance with it: 9 hours, 34 minutes of continuous video playback with Wi-Fi on and brightness turned to max. That beat out the 7 hours, 53 minutes we got on the Asus TF300 , not to mention the five and a half hours the new iPad achieved.
Android and AppsThe A510 runs Android 4.0.3 with a light skin, Acer’s Ring UI. Take a look at our full review of Android 4.0 (4 stars), Ice Cream Sandwich, for more details on the basic OS here.
Pressing a virtual button at the bottom of the screen pops up five quick app shortcuts, a carousel of Web bookmarks, and a volume control. the tablet also comes with a few custom widgets and apps. Acer Print lets you print documents or Web pages to a wide variety of Wi-Fi-enabled printers. Aupeo is a custom radio app. McAfee does antivirus duty, Polaris Office reads Microsoft Office documents, and clear.fi is a DLNA media server.
Benchmarks came out looking great, as they generally do on tablets with Nvidia’s blazing Tegra 3 processor. Running here at 1.3GHz, the A510 scored faster than the 1.2GHz Asus Transformer Pad TF300T and roughly on par with the original Transformer Prime , which also had a 1.3GHz quad-core processor.
But I encountered strange performance slowdowns when testing the A510. sometimes on-screen buttons weren’t responsive; I found this both on the built-in keyboard and in Zen Pinball. sometimes screens took an extra moment to render. these issues didn’t occur all the time, but they happened often enough to annoy (and to lose some pinball games).
10-inch Android tablets still have a problem with finding good apps in Google Play. As most apps are designed for small phone screens, many prominent apps look pretty awful on large Android tablets. the A510 offers two options to help with this problem: You can download either Tablified Market ($1.49, 4 stars), with a list of 1,500 or so top-notch tablet apps, or Nvidia’s Tegra Zone, with a few dozen high-quality games designed for Tegra-powered tablets. those outlets improve the situation, but app availability still falls far short of the Apple iPad, which has over 200,000 third-party apps with UIs designed specifically for tablets. the A510 connects to the Internet using Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n (albeit only on 2.4GHz, not 5GHz). it had no trouble connecting to our WPA2-protected networks. it also supports Bluetooth 2.1. and there’s a blocked-off SIM card slot behind a door on the side, a sloppy touch—either eliminate the slot or make it active.
Multimedia and ConclusionsThe A510 has 32GB of built-in storage as well as a microSD card slot that supports 32GB cards, hidden behind a door on the side. it plays all the usual audio and video formats, including MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG, WAV, WMV, H.264, MP4, DivX and Xvid (in AVI containers). Video files up to 1080p resolution looked sharp and clear. Oddly, though, the built-in micro HDMI port only put out 720p resolution to our TV.
The tablet has a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 1-megapixel front camera. Indoor shots taken with the rear camera looked noisy, with a decidedly purple cast. Not great. Low-light photos showed some blur from low shutter speeds. Outdoors, images were sharper, but still with that purplish color imbalance. the front camera’s 1-megapixel still images actually had better colors.
The tablet records 1080p video at 30 frames per second outdoors, but indoors that drops to a jittery 16 frames per second. 720p videos indoors clock in at 20 frames per second. As I know the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor can handle 1080p at 30 frames per second without breaking a sweat, this is probably just a cut-rate camera module.
If the Iconia Tab A510 cost $50 less, it would have a different rating. Priced at $450, this tablet sits in an uncomfortable middle ground. it certainly has some things going for it, most notably its long battery life and powerful speakers.
Unfortunately for the A510, you can get more capable tablets for less. the Asus TF300T, at $399 for a similar 32GB model, gives you 95 percent of the A510′s speed, along with a better camera and slimmer form factor, for less money. the Apple iPad 2, currently running $399, is another prime competitor—it isn’t as fast as the Iconia 510, but it has far, far more tablet-optimized apps. I’d also keep an eye out for Toshiba’s upcoming tablet line, which we did a recent hands-on with. it promises Tegra 3 power and Android 4.0 with USB host mode in a sleeker body.
More Tablet Reviews:• Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1)• Toshiba Excite 10 LE• Acer Iconia Tab A510• Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 (Verizon Wireless)• Asus Transformer Pad TF300• more
Acer Iconia Tab A510
Dell has their Streak lineup of tablets with the Dell Streak 5 and the Dell Streak 7. Both aren’t really true tablets in my opinion though since they aren’t running Google’s tablet version of Android which is Honeycomb. Instead they are running the smartphone version of Android. But recently Dell teased a 10-inch tablet running Honeycomb called the Dell Streak 10 Pro and it looks like that tablet is now getting showed off in China.
