bigger is better
10" for £200 please?
Extreme PC Week Acer unveiled the Iconia Tab A110 at Computex in Taipei this week - a quad-core tablet that should be available for £130. Wowzers. The Acer Iconia Tab A110 - set to replace the Iconia Tab A100 - features a 7in display with a resolution of 1024 x 600. Acer Iconia A100 7in Android tablet A100 to get the …
It's depressing how few of the budget devices, even those with Ice Cream Tablet, offer it.
C'mon, El Reg, when are you going to do a budget group test? Things cheap enough to be throwaway purchases?
[1] Well, it is in our house. The missus doesn't give a damn about applications - all she wants to do is browse t'interwebs and watch granddaughter growing up from six hundred miles away.
Indeed.
This is not something I would use to any extent; my computing needs are not those of the Missus.
But I'm at a loss to understand why manufacturers build a platform with a user facing camera of limited resolution and then put the thing on the market *without* the obvious application.
The tablet is a thing for *consuming media* (<shudder>, I hate that phrase) rather than working on; in all practical respects it's a toy. But it should be a toy with *some* utility surely; my missus happens to think that being able to see granddaughter - and for granddaughter to see us - is a worthwhile utility. And to be honest, *she's* the customer. Not you or me, who might buy a tablet because it's cool, but because she wants to do a specific task, or small number of tasks. She doesn't care what the label is or who wrote the software; she just wants it to work.
I've only used skype twice. Once from a hotel room in Vienna to say goodnight to my kids while away with work. And once a few days later from Munich to explain why daddy wasnt going to be home like he said because there was a delay in Vienna that made me miss the connecting flight.
It has its uses. But it wouldnt be the killer app for me. I'd get a lot more use from netflix than i would from skype. And my use of that would be positively dwarfed by my use of "the internet" in general.
Why do all these 7" tabs look like fat chubbers? I guess you fingers don't get smaller along with the size, so the bezels stay the same. Maybe that's it. Or maybe there is more space to spread out the leccy stuff in the big ones, so they can be thinner. Or perhaps they are the same thinness but as they're bigger 'seem' thinner.
I don't know, but they all just look chunky to me. Won't have it.
"although the impact on battery life of having that quad-core CPU remains to be seen"
That's what the fifth core is for, which is nothing more than a "tick-over" core, that refreshes memory and stuff, the bare minimum needed to keep the OS alive when the screen is off. As soon as it aways, all the main cores come alive again.
That's why the Tegra3 have very good battery life, despite some pretty beefy CPU specs (for ARM at least).
In the specs list, you forgot to add the point:
* No future support, because its an Acer.
Seriously...check out the abortion that is the A500 and A501 tablet upgrade to ICS to prove the point that Acer will willingly flip out a new tablet, fully under the misguided belief that the user won't ever want to update it to a new android version, and not even offer to open source the drivers etc and let the community do the work.
A500 users had ICS eventually rolled out, which failed on a heap of tablets, so Acer pulled the update.
A501 users? Hah! Its the same as an A501 except it has a 3g modem...but noone would want to run ICS on that! Lets not even bother offering an update!
Wait until Asus, or Sammy release a tegra 3 tablet, and don't waste your time on this waste of a company.
Seems like I've been waiting ages for that perfect Android-based tablet. I lost patience and went for a cut-price Mororola Xoom, and I'm happy to an extent but certain annoying niggles remain where things don't quite work correctly at times. Yahoo Mail is one of the worst offenders.
By the time the other manufacturers release Tegra 3 tablets the price will have doubled - surprise surprise!
My quest for the (tablet) Grail continues.......sigh.