Acer Iconia Tab A500

Price: 27990

Digit Rating: Good

3.5/5

Features:

Performance:

Value:

Design:

PROS

• Great feature set, connectivity options
• Good, capable UI

CONS

• Steep learning curve of UI
• Bluish cast to screen

Summary

The Acer Iconia Tab A500 has good underlying software coupled with decent hardware. But we think the display can be improved. If not an IPS panel, the least Acer can do is get rid of the blue cast. The connectivity options give it a slight edge over the iPad, and also the user interface of the Honeycomb OS and its response is great. However, the OS needs a learning curve and is not as intuitive as the iOS. As far as Android tablets go, this is the best on the market right now thanks to its dual core processor and Honeycomb OS. The price of Rs. 27,990 is lower than the iPad 2 (16GB). It is a value for money product for the features and performance on offer.

As far as tablets go, Apple’s iPad has sort of set a benchmark of what they should be. And even though we have seen companies churning out tablets every month, nothing has come close to it in terms of usability, build quality, compatibility with apps, etc. Android tablets are dime a dozen in the market, but most of them come with an operating system that was built for smartphones. Windows OS tabletshave also made an entry in the market, but haven’t got much traction as far as sales go.

Android had released the Honeycomb operating system sometime earlier this year, as an OS meant for the tablet product category. The Motorola Xoom was the first tablet to feature it. But we have got our hands on Acer’s Iconia Tab A500 which sports the Honeycomb OS and has reached the Indian market before the guys are Motorola Mobility got the Xoom here. So is Honeycomb OS the answer to iOS and can the Iconia Tab A500 provide that much lacking competition to the ruler – the iPad? Let’s find out...

Look and Feel

Coming in a grayish silver brush metal finish body, the A500 does not have any sharp edges. The rear covering peeps out from the top and lower portion on the front side. The screen is 10.1-inch wide diagonally and has a resolution of 1280x800 pixels. It is an LED backlit LCD screen with a glossy finish. The rounded edges allows the tablet to be held comfortably in your palms, but we would have liked a bit more grip. The power button is located on the top left hand edge and is easy to reach and has the 3.5 mm audio jack just above it as well as the mini HDMI port on the lower edge. The volume controller is located on the top edge beside the orientation lock button which has a nice click mechanism. On the right hand edge there is a power port at the top, a mini-USB port and USB port on the lower edge.

The 5 MP camera section is located on the on the top right hand edge of the rear side and sports a single LED flash whereas the bezel on the left hand side houses the front facing 2MP camera. Two speakers are located on the lower half and you will notice your fingers covering them when you hold the tablet in the landscape mode. We really liked the case it comes along with, which can bend to form a stand against which you can place your A500 and enjoy a movie.

User Interface

Google has built the Honeycomb user interface from the ground up and resembles nothing like its smartphone cousins. The display is divided into five home screens. The main home page has three buttons on the lower left hand corner for going back, coming to the home screen and looking at the apps that have been opened at a time. It houses the NVIDIA Tegra 2 system on chip with a snappy 1 GHz dual core processor. Navigating through the home screens is breezy and you will notice the outlines of frame disappearing as you settle onto one screen, a nice touch. Long holding a particular home screen will give you a zoomed out view of the five home screens with options to add more widgets, applications, wallpapers, etc to the screens via a simple drag and drop mechanism.

You can see the last five opened applications by simply tapping on the button beside Home. Getting into the Settings menu from the task bar requires three clicks unless you are looking for common tasks such as setting up WiFi, turning Notifications on/off, changing brightness and activating Airplane mode. This may seem like a round about way of doing things. The Settings menu is quite exhaustive with an additional option called Dolby Mobile. The on board Youtube widget has a stack of videos arranged in a domino setup. Gmail application syncs without any issues and has a left and right hand panel arrangement with the settings options arranged on the upper right hand corner. The bundled browser is quite good with the tab functionality which allows you to have around 16 tabs open at a time. You can scroll through the tabs which is a smart rather than clicking on the Next Tab option to get to tab number 15.

You will notice apps placed in a drawer section on the homepage, which houses related applications. There’s Multimedia, Social, eReading and GameZone which are the broad categories and you will have related applications such as audio / video player apps under Multimedia, Lumiread and the Browser under eReading and so on. With the help of a round button housing the plus sign, you can add extra applications under each section. This functionality is somewhat similar to the Folder function in the iOS, except that in the Honeycomb OS, you do not have the ability to name the folder. Visually though it looks much better than the Folder implementation on the iOS, but then again, it just adds more clicks needed to get into a particular application.

Click to enlarge

An application drawer screenshot. There are four of these	The eReading app drawer
The GameZone app drawer	The Multimedia app drawer
The Social app drawer	You can add apps in each of the four App Drawers via the Add button
The Settings menu showing the various options	The options seen under the Dolby Mobile menu
The Sound settings menu	Wireless Network settings menu

Multimedia Applications

Acer Iconia A500 has some native multimedia applications such as NemoPlayer – organizes your photos, music and videos and plays them back when selected. Photo Browser 3D allows you to see your albums using gestures to toggle between photographs, we found the implementation very laggy. MusicA is an application that claims to listen to an audio track and give you the details of the tracks being played. We tried it with popular artists like Eminem, Pink Floyd, Evanescence and Porcupine Tree, but its GraceNote server could not come up with any results. So on the whole, the native multimedia apps, even though they look great, fail to impress. YouTube was probably the only app which worked without any hitch.

The Social Jogger application tends to collate your Twitter and Facebook timeline and give you updates, but for some reason we were getting updates that were 5 hours older despite having an auto refresh time of 15 minutes, which was just strange. LumiRead is a native ebook reader application and is just like any other ebook reader app out there, with options to segregate the books according to genres. It also has one touch access to bookstores, although at present the countries to choose from were just Germany and China.

Screen

The Iconia A500 has a conventional LCD screen which was a huge letdown. The picture quality is good and it has good brightness levels, but the colour accuracy is debatable as we found a heavy bluish cast on the screen. When placed beside an iPad 2 we could clearly see the difference. We tried adjusting the brightness to get a good contrast but the bluish cast ruins things. In one of our videos, a hot pink coloured wall was rendered as violet on the A500.

The onscreen keypad is great to type on in both the landscape and portrait mode. In the landscape mode, you will not be able to type comfortably with your thumb, so you will end up using one hand to hold the tablet and the other to type. Holding the tablet in the portrait mode allows easy typing, but your as the keypad is located in the bottom, balancing the tablet while speedy typing is an issue. We did not have any issues with typing errors though.

Camera and Video

The on board 5 MP camera is quite OK for casual shooting in outdoor conditions. Shots taken indoors were noisy. Video shooting is poor with jerky videos and there is no option to zoom in or out while live shooting. However we liked the implementation of camera functionalities in the rotary dial sort of a way. Tapping an icon opens up a range of options to choose from so that you do not have to get out of the camera mode to finalise your settings. Sound quality is quite decent thanks to the Dolby Mobile setting option which allows you to adjust Treble and Bass and select from a range of equalizer settings. We just found the volume to be very low, and with the Dolby Music disabled, you will really have to strain your ears to listen to the audio. Even though the fingers tend to cover the speakers, the sound output is not affected. Do not expect great audio though. We found the bass lacking the punch and low frequency sounds went for a toss.

Video playback was a problem area because we could not play most of our test videos despite converting them to the formats supported by the Iconia Tab. We had to rely on YouTube's full HD videos for this test. The video quality was good, but we did notice some noise and banding in scenes with solid colours. The reflective screen can be annoying if you have light sources in the background.

The A500 has a mini HDMI port which allows you to connect the tablet to an LCD TV via an HDMI cable. 

Click to enlarge

The rear portion of the tablet having a 5 MP camera on the top right hand corner along with an LED flash	The digital watch seen on the home page
The applications screen which is activated by tapping on the Apps symbol on the upper right hand corner of the home screen	You can add you most used apps under the My Apps tab
Quick Settings menu	A zoomed out view showing all the five home screens along with options to add widgets, applications, etc
Most visited web pages arranged in a tiled manner	The outline of the apps on the previous page
YouTube widget arranges the videos in the form of a stack of dominos. You can also cycle through them	When off the screen is like a mirror, reflecting the background

Battery Life

The Acer Iconia Tab A500 lasted a good two days on full charge, with regular surfing on WiFi, watching YouTube videos, push email, listening to music, gaming and reading ebooks.

Verdict

The Acer Iconia Tab A500 has good underlying software coupled with decent hardware. But we think the display can be improved. If not an IPS panel, the least Acer can do is get rid of the blue cast. The connectivity options give it a slight edge over the iPad, and also the user interface of the Honeycomb OS and its response is great. However, the OS needs a learning curve and is not as intuitive as the iOS. As far as Android tablets go, this is the best on the market right now thanks to its dual core processor and Honeycomb OS. The price of Rs. 27,990 is lower than the iPad 2 (16GB). It is a value for money product for the features and performance on offer.

Rating:

Features: 8
Performance: 7
Build Quality: 6
Value for money: 7
Overall: 7

Price: Rs. 27,990

Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101G

Price: 42999

Digit Rating: Good

4/5

Features:

Performance:

Value:

Design:

PROS

• Beautiful IPS display
• Detachable screen
• Premium look and feel
• Good keyboard

CONS

• Touchpad on dock isn't the best

Summary

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101g is a dream come true which pairs a very good Android tablet with a tried-and-tested netbook keyboard to create one great product. It's sleek, stylish, and extremely practical and well worth its asking price.

Ever thought of blending an iPad with a dedicated keyboard, like a netbook’s? Sure, we all did. But the folks over at Asus did more than just that with the Eee Pad Transformer TF101. With a 10.1-inch IPS touchscreen display, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer has a docking station that’s identical to any 10-inch Asus Eee PC netbook’s. The intelligent docking station allows the Eee Pad TF101 to transform into a 10-inch Android netbook, if you will, for tasks that otherwise are cumbersome to do with mere swipes. How well does the 10-inch Asus Transformer Android Honeycomb tablet do? Let’s find out.

Design and Build: 
There are two aspects to consider regarding the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101’s design and build — treating it as a tablet and a netbook. For a tablet, the Eee Pad Transformer’s 10.7 x 6.9 x 0.5 inches, roughly the same size as the Acer Iconia A500 but larger than the Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab 750. As a tablet, the Asus Transformer weighs about 680 grams — marginally heavier than the Apple iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 750, but lighter than the Motorola Xoom and Acer Iconia A500/501 Android Honeycomb tablets.

In terms of size and form factor, the Transformer is one of the better 10-inch tablets out there. Even as a clamshell netbook, when hooked to the extended docking station-cum-keyboard, it tips the scales at 1.32 kg (similar to any 10-inch netbook in the market) and is quite slim with the lid closed measuring just over 1 inch in thickness. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer is an extremely portable device, with or without its docking station.

Its look and feel is unique among tablets, sporting a hard plastic shell with a textured mesh finish that gives the tablet a touch of premium elegance. The mesh extends on to the bottom panel of the keyboard dock. Where the tablet/screen fits into the keyboard dock, the sliding lock holds the two separate parts well, with slight jittering — it isn’t rock solid, nonetheless it’ll do.

Features: 
The Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 Android tablet has a 10.1-inch IPS touchscreen display that’s scratch-resistant. The screen has an LED-backlit panel with a capacitive multitouch surface that packs in 1280x800 pixel resolution — greater screen area than the iPad 2, and better quality display than Motorola Xoom and Acer Iconia A501. In terms of core components, the Asus Eee Pad Transfomer TF101 comes equipped with a dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor and a ULP GeForce GPU on a Tegra 2 chipset. The Transformer further features 1GB of RAM and 16 GB of onboard storage.

Slimness

In terms of connectivity ports, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 comes with a microSD slot, mini HDMI out, headphone jack and a 3G SIM card slot along its screen edge; wireless connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1. On the extended keyboard dock, the Asus Transformer has two extra USB 2.0 ports and a 3-in-1 card reader slot. It also has a built-in GPS, accelerometer and gyro sensor. Stereo speakers are placed along the edge of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer.

The Transformer’s screen bezel has a 1.2 MP front-facing camera and a fixed-focus 5MP rear camera for taking photos and capturing video at HD 720p. The bundled OS is obviously Android Honeycomb build 3.2.1 and one of its features lets you plug in a camera directly to the Eee Pad Transformer to transfer media directly. In terms of features and specs, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer is one of the best tablets out there — throw in a keyboard dock with a dedicated touchpad, and it has no competition.

Performance:

Display

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101G comes with a 10.1-inch IPS display screen. The screen is definitely one of the brightest we’ve seen on a 10-inch tablet, with great black levels and vivid colours. The screen has amazing viewing angles with very little colour shift and its glossy surface doesn’t attract as many fingerprint smudges even when you swipe across it all day long. Whether its reading an ebook, viewing a photo album or watching a movie, the Eee Pad Transformer TF101G’s screen doesn’t disappoint one bit. The screen’s extremely responsive and its feedback couldn’t be any better.

Keyboard dock

The Eee Pad Transformer TF101G’s keyboard dock sports the exact same layout as any 10-inch Eee PC netbook launched within this past year. Sporting chiclet-sized isolated keys that are good to type on, the dock has a wide touchpad with a single-strip mouse button, too. We found the keyboard good for typing but the touchpad was too smooth for optimum feedback and it takes some getting used to. Also, since the Transformer is primarily an Android device, there are dedicated Home, Back, Screen Lock, Search, Settings, Screenshot, etc. buttons for conveniently interacting with the tablet — props to Asus for incorporating an intelligent key arrangement on the keyboard for optimally interacting with the tablet.

Onscreen keyboard

Asus has also tweaked the vanilla Android interface to help maximise the end-user experience —for example, the on-screen keyboard has five rows instead of four featured on plain vanilla Honeycomb; the extra row adds numbers which can be conveniently typed, saving you unnecessary finger clicks. The default water-level wallpaper across all homescreens is a battery indicator, rising and falling depending on battery. Also, the Back, Home, Recent Apps button on the bottom left of the home screen are visually different, more easier to launch than how they’re depicted in vanilla Honeycomb builds. So whatever tiny tweaks Asus has made to the Eee Pad Transformer’s interface only enhances the end-user experience.

The tablet’s 5MP camera has a basic interface when it comes to clicking photos. Pictures clicked in bright sunlit or very well lit interiors are good with just a shade of noise. Captured video isn’t the best in terms of quality but its average. The Transformer tablet’s multimedia experience doesn’t disappoint. In fact it’s one of the best among tablets we’ve tested. The Asus Transformer’s onboard speakers are loud and clear even at high volumes and handle both music and speech equally well. Whether it’s watching YouTube videos or HD 720p flicks, the Eee Pad Transformer handled video playback very well. And its audio-video performance helped deliver a stellar entertainment experience.

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101G is one of the best tablets in terms of overall battery life. At full-screen brightness and surfing the web over Wi-Fi gave about 8 hours of battery backup (with two fifteen hour breaks); I’m sure you can extract more juice by decreasing brightness and disabling Wi-Fi. But wait, this is just the battery life of the tablet; the keyboard dock comes with its very own battery which adds another 3 to 4 hours of extra battery usage off a single charge. What’s more, when the tablet’s attached to the dock, the battery from the dock drains out before eating into the tablet’s charge -- very good thinking.

Verdict: The Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101G sells for a price of Rs. 42,999 (including taxes). Compared to other popular 10-inch Android Honeycomb tablets out there -- Motorola Xoom, Acer Iconia A501, Samsung Galaxy Tab 750, etc. -- its price may be very high, but it also has a unique selling point. Overall, the Asus Transformer tablet is one of a kind, with a very good combination of features and performance, and well worth the price.

Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Sony Tablet S

Price: 29990

Digit Rating: Good

3.5/5

Features:

Performance:

Value:

Design:

PROS

• Unique folded around book/magazine design
• Bright and vivid display
• Universal remote app is very useful
• PlayStation certification is good news for gamers

CONS

• Daylight robbery of internal storage space!
• No HDMI out - just DLNA streaming
• Unable to handle e-book PDFs

Summary

Fashionably late to arrive for the tablet war bloodshed, but we don't really mind. The Tablet S catches your attention with the excellent performance, unique design and interesting extra features like the Universal Remote and the PlayStation app. However, Sony needs to address the issue of internal storage space available - only about 9GB is available for the user out of the 16GB. If it is an Android tablet you desire, you now have the choice between this and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750. Else, if you still want the best tablet around, spend the cash on the Apple iPad 2.

Not long ago, we had mentioned how tears of joy had welled up in our eyes when we saw the performance and the slim package of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750. And quite rightly, we reckoned it was the closest an Android tablet got to an iPad 2. What a difference a month or so makes. The Sony Tablet Sstrides through the door, dressed smartly and looks like it comes from the tablet’s equivalent of a gym!

Look & Feel
The design of the Sony Tablet S is inspired by what a folded around (open, in simpler terms) magazine looks like. In a world full of similar looking tablets, this unique design does stand out considerably. While reviewing the Sony Tablet S, we noticed that on the thicker side, the plastic smoothly curves downwards, and continues to the rear panel. This curve ensures that it isn't uncomfortable to hold. Since the orientation will rotate in any direction, you can hold the tablet in the right or the left hand, with equal ease. The thick part melting into a thin panel on the other side of the tablet means that if you place it flat on a table in landscape mode, the slight incline/ elevation makes typing very comfortable.

Admittedly, the Sony Tablet S isn't the slimmest tablet around. But the form does deceive a certain bit in the beginning, and you pick it up with more force than needed. Mostly because you might be thinking that it is heavy, heavier than it actually is. The iPad 2 (Wi-Fi) weighs 601 grams, and the Tablet S weighs 598 grams. The Tab 750 steals the march though, weighing just 565gms.

The key and port placement is slightly weird, due to the different design. The power key, along with the volume rocker is in the right side indentation, while the 3.5mm port, the USB port and the SD (yes, you read that right!) card slot is on the left side indentation. The proprietary charging port is on the thinnest part of the Tablet S, on the panel below the display, in landscape mode. Do not like the brick adapter though - we aren’t carrying a laptop, are we?

The Sony Tablet S is dressed in a glossy black finish, on the complete plastic panel. Very high quality plastic though, and we didn’t feel any flex on any part of the tablet. The glossy finish will be a scratch magnet though.

Features
No shortage of power. Sony has ensured that the Tablet S has adequate power always. A 1GHz dual core processor, and 1GB of RAM power the tablet. The version that Sony has launched in India is the 16GB one, with Wi-Fi only.

However, the real goodness begins here. The Sony Tablet S has the “PlayStation certification”. What you get on board are the PS classics - Crash Bandicoot and PinBall heroes. However, the promise lies in the potential - Sony’s huge library of PSP and PS3 titles should make their way to the tablet in a few months time. This is really the first time any Android tablet has flexed its gaming muscles.

The universal remote application relies on the RF sensor that Sony has thoughtfully stuffed in the Tablet S. It should, in theory, control any gadget that has an RF remote control, so long as you can either configure the preloaded remotes or make the app learn that particular remote.

Sony hasn’t gone for the full-blown customization of Android - neither with the 3.1 nor with the 3.2 that the review unit came with. What they have done is slightly tweaked the UI and added certain widgets and shortcuts to the home screen. However, beyond that, the apps menu has been completely redone, and admittedly, looks better and livelier than before.

Performance
The combination of a powerful dual core processor and 1GB RAM means using Honeycomb is a delight to use. The slickness of the interface can also be attributed to the light mods that Sony has deployed on the UI. We have seen instances of overdoing it hinder performance considerably, time and again.

Most visible when you are swiping between screens - no slowdowns or screen tearing type feel. Speaking of which, the touch response is absolutely fantastic, equally comfortable to use in both portrait and landscape mode, with the finger or the thumb!

Click to enlarge

The 9.4-inch display puts the Tablet S in what we loosely call the “10-inch tablet” category. No fancy display tech here - just a simple TFT LCD, but the brightness levels as well as the colour depth was delightful. The white colour levels are quite good as well, something that has disappointed us in a lot of other potentially good Android tablets. During the Sony Tablet S review, we also played some videos. Well, it was a heart-warming experience - the entire warmth of colour and smoothness of the fast moving images was just brilliant. However, Android still cannot playback a lot of video files due to codec incompatibility issues. Downloading the free MX Player along with the separate codec package (with the same name) solved the problem. The built-in speakers are quite loud, and clear up to a volume of about 60%. Beyond that, the jarring is quite audible. But then again, we would recommend using a good set of earphones for headphones with almost any tablet.

While they were tweaking the Honeycomb UI, Sony also threw out the original on-screen keypad and replaced it with an absolutely delightful version of their own. Using it was an experience of comfort closest to the Apple iPad 2’s on-screen pad. When you select fields like passwords, the number pad is automatically added on the right side corner, just helping speed up the entry process.

The web browser turned out to be another delight during the Tablet S review. We found absolutely no fault with the page rendering quality, and the speeds at which that was done.

Sony has preloaded the Tablet S with quite a few unique apps. The first of which is the Sony Select app - where you find a few handpicked apps for the tablet. This works parallel to the Android Market. We did find quite a few display bugs in this app - slide wont change, one slide would end up with the text from the previous one still visible, and the sluggishness of the entire app in general. Another problem we faced during the Tablet S review was with the PlayStation app. Every time we attempted to open the app to download more titles, it would ask us to download some identity manager, and direct us to that download on the Android Market. But ever single time we did that, we got the ‘download not found’ error.

However, all is not bleak with the preloaded apps. The universal remote app is an absolute delight to use. Apart from a whole lot of preloaded remotes for various devices, you can also make it learn any remote. Apart from the usual suspects - TV and Home Theater, we even got it to learn the remote of the Samsung air-conditioner in the room, and worked flawlessly every single time. A very very useful app to have, if half of the space on your coffee table is taken up by various remotes!

Why there is no HDMI port is because of the DLNA “throw” feature that Sony is promoting. The idea is to be able to “throw” any video from the tablet on to a compatible (read - connected on the same network as well) television and enjoy it on a bigger screen. For those who don’t have a network-connected television just yet, the omission of the HDMI port is like the future that has come a bit too soon.

When we got the Tablet S for review, it came with the Android 3.2.1 version. Sony rolled out this update for those who had purchased this with the Android 3.1 version. A couple of days of using it, and there was a 14MB system update. Duly downloaded and installed, but not too much performance difference. Good thing, for it didn’t deteriorate in any way either! But there was a problem we had hoped it would solve, but didn’t. The problem we are talking about relates to playing back some music, and then changing the tablet’s orientation. Every time the orientation changes, the music stutters for a second. Secondly, no e-book reader app was able to handle e-magazine PDF files smoothly. While reviewing the Tablet S, we used the same 80MB PDF file of a magazine on the iPad 2 as well, but the jerkiness, stutters and sudden coma was a regular occurrence! For a tablet that handles heavier video formats with aplomb, this is an unexpected disappointment.

The battery life of the Sony Tablet S is better than most of the Android tablets - Xoom and Iconia A501 in particular. The battery will let you watch videos for 4 hours continuously, with Wi-Fi connected in the background. If you use this for a bit of web browsing, e-book reading and not a lot of videos, this can easily last you between 3-4 days on a single charge.

Our Take
In terms of sheer performance comparison, it is touch-and-go between the Sony Tablet S and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750. Both have their own uniqueness when it comes to the form factor. It is a very close call between the two, except the Tab 750 also comes in a 3G version. We would recommend checking both of these tablets before making up your mind.

Price: Rs. 29,990 MRP (Wi-Fi only model)
Rs. 33,990 (3G+Wi-Fi model)

Specs:
Android 3.2.1, ARM Cortex A9 dual core 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 9.4-inch display, 1280x800 pixel resolution, 16GB internal storage, SD card slot for expandable memory, Wi-Fi only, 5000 mAh battery

RatingsFeatures: 8.5
Performance: 7
Build: 7.5
Value: 7
Overall: 7

Contact: Sony India
Phone: 18001037799
Website: http://www.sony.co.in