ACER BRINGING IN THE TOUCH MAGIC

To tighten its hold on the computer market, Acer recently launched a range of tablets under the iconia series. These handfuls of tablets are led by the 10-inch A500, which runs on the new Android Honeycomb 3.0 and the Windows-based W500. So let’s find out how good these are.

ICONIA A500
If we go with the size of this Acer tablet, it is a bit bulkier than the ipad though having the same size. Again comparing it with ipad there is no home button on the bezel of the tablet, which is something you get used to when you are using an ipad. Along with a really good tab button, there is always home button at the bottom when the screen is on. Its screen shows both, the applications you just opened and those which are still working in the background. The operating system of this tablet is a relief. For its different with the other android devices we have been trying our hand for the last couple of years. It doesn’t let all the applications take over the real estate because of the flowing honeycomb. The smaller icons give the homescreen a much neater look. The acer A500 can play HD video easily without any problem and runs on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core 1.0 GHz processor. This is the first tablet build with Dolby Mobile audio, which gives a real good sound. It’s very handy if you wish to use it for playing games and watching movies.
You can easily alter the settings of 5MP camera by a dial like interface. With 2MP front camera you can perform video chat easily. Acer claims that you will have the same multimedia and web experience as you have, while using your PC is somewhat achieved. As we are yet to see the 3G version, but it supports Flash 10.1, which is a plus point over ipads. Input options in this tablet are another USP as it has a microSD slot along with USB and micro USB. Though having so many USP, it also has a frustrating feature that their no way around with which you can delete files from the tablet. Battery of this tablet is good enough for six to eight hours. Acer sells its ICONIA A500 for Rs27,990.

W500
The W500 is full of surprises, some are good and some are not. But the first one is definitely a good one for those who easily get frustrated with the touch interface. This is because of its slot-locked keyboard. After a good one, the other surprise is not that good. Using Windows 7 as its OS is not impressive at all as we have all seen and used it earlier. It has the one new thing- neat handwriting recognition software and it works really well. Being a windows Tablet, it has Windows button on the frame which opens the program menu. It can sometime irritate you as takes it in own time to switch from horizontal to vertical view. Although there is no micro USB, but it can read content from USB and micro SD card slot. Along with other features it has an Acer’s unique one i.e., every time you touch the screen, a small circle or star appears and accompanies your finger on the screen. It has a price tag of Rs32,499.