Acer Iconia A500 10.1" Honeycomb Review - Part 2

[Guest christonge]

Acer Iconia A500 10.1" Honeycomb Review - Part 2

As most of you well know the Iconia A500 is running Android 3.0 Honeycomb (build 3.0.1) which amoungst other features has an fantastic action bar and on screen action buttons, five customisable home screens, a recent apps list for multitasking, a redesigned on-screen keyboard, a new "chrome-like" browser plus improved copy and paste.

The Acer Iconia A500's Web browser is slick, fast in general and displays Flash content most of the time with minimal delay. It also supports tabbed Web browsing and the entire browsing experience is as close as you'll find to a full desktop or notebook computer. However it's extremely prone to crashing when loading heavy flash sites and some sites are just downright sluggish eg Twitter.

The overall out-of-the-box experience of Honeycomb is pretty good and although Acer have added a few apps the overall experience is pretty much vanilla. There’s an app called Clear.fi that allows you to wirelessly connect to other devices in your home network and it works very well.

There's a pre-installed book reader called LumiRead which allows you to import ebu files no problem and although it's not the best book reader I've used, it's good enough. Saying that, I would really like to get my hands on Google books for Honeycomb but as of date it only appears to be pre-installed on the Xoom in the States :-( Shame...

A more pressing issue for me is the lack of third-party apps in the Android market that have been designed with a tablet in mind. So far I've only found a handful of dedicated apps and I can only hope that the tablet market mirrors the way the Android phone market has developed in the last year. That way we won't need to wait too long to make the full use of this platform.

Acer claims the Iconia A500's battery is good for up to 10 hours and although it depends on what your using the A500 for, on the whole the battery is fantastic. If you plan on doing a full day’s work on this device then it's fine. On an average day I get a full 24 hours before it runs out of juice. . Though the Iconia A500 often lasted over two days with moderate use, although listening to music and watching videos obviously reduces battery life.

Tomorrow I will look at the camera and give an overall view... thanks!

[Guest Blasphemous]

Stop posting these reviews... my pocket can't take it! :)

Thank you for the info so far. It looks really really good I have to say.

[Guest Radu M]

Hi and thanks for the review!

Is there any way you could test how well the USB (master) port works? Does it work well with USB sticks? Can it read / write to NTFS or FAT32 sticks? What about plugging in other peripherals like keyboards, perhaps a camera...

Since this is something that almost all the other tablets lack, it would benefit from some attention. On an ASUS Transformer Pad review I've read that the USB ports on it don't work all that well. Sometimes they do, other times they don't and with no apparent cause. I was curious if that's the case here.

Thanks!

[Guest christonge]

Hi and thanks for the review!

Is there any way you could test how well the USB (master) port works? Does it work well with USB sticks? Can it read / write to NTFS or FAT32 sticks? What about plugging in other peripherals like keyboards, perhaps a camera...

Since this is something that almost all the other tablets lack, it would benefit from some attention. On an ASUS Transformer Pad review I've read that the USB ports on it don't work all that well. Sometimes they do, other times they don't and with no apparent cause. I was curious if that's the case here.

Thanks!

I'll write something about that tomorrow for you :-)

[Guest Radu M]

I'll write something about that tomorrow for you :-)

Thanks, I appreciate it!

[Guest Markee]

Thanks, I appreciate it!

Any idea when part three will appear?

[Guest OptimusStudio]

wowww.. wonderfull.. i like it.. :) :)