Acer announced about a year ago that they invested quite a bit in their Research and Development department(RND) and finally today we can see the output. The Acer Iconia Tab A100 is the first mini-tablet from the company who is well known for making some solid laptops.  There is also the Acer Iconia A 500 but that can be compared with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 or the iPad 2. However, the Iconia Tab A100 has a very keen competitor, The HTC Flyer. So to make things simple for you there are a lot of tablets being released these days and A100 falls in the start out category. A comparison with the big ones would be simply useless. So let’s go ahead and look as to what the Acer A100 has to offer, In terms of Looks, Functionality and Features.

Looks

The Acer Iconia Tab A100 is a 7 inch  tablet running on Android 3.2 Honeycomb. The tablet is 4.6 inch tall and looks compact. The back has a navy blue design with all sorts of stylish ribbon graphics populating the back plate. A 5 megapixel camera and a LED flash is placed at the center of the back side.  From the first glance the Acer A100 looks like an E-Reader and you might think that it would fit more comfortably in the hands. However the HTC flyer has a better elegant finish to it and is far more comfortable to hold.

On the front of the tablet we have a secondary 2 Mega Pixel Camera for Video conferencing and stuff. There is also a white painted home screen area  at the bottom end in front of the tablet. Like many of the tablets out there it’s not a physical button but a very responsive touch sensitive area. It also glows when your tablet is on. Right on top of the tablet there is a glowing power/ lock button, some labeling and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The bottom of the tablet has two speakers on two sides a mini USB port, HDMI port and a Acer dock in the center.

The tablet looks really clean and is mostly thinner at 7 inches in Portrait mode but as soon as you change to landscape you can feel your thumbs being stretched. This is because of the very design of the tablet itself. Also you must remember that while the HTC Flyer has a  stylish looking Aluminum back casing, the Acer A100 has a roundish glossy plastic case and is highly prone to fingerprints.

Features

The Acer A100 Comes packed with some pretty cool features. Firstly the fact that it’s running Android 3.2 on a small 7 inch screen allows the tablet to give you a flawless performance. Its backed by a 1Ghz Tegra 2 processor and 1GB of RAM. You can use the tablet as much as you want but I bet that you will hardly see any lag when sliding or using the touch gestures. The Acer comes packed with a 7 inch display with a resolution of 1024-600. The viewing angles are pretty good and the two speakers at the bottom ensure that the tablet produces decent sounds.

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The 5 megapixel camera can take superb pictures, way better than the HTC Flyer. It can also shoot videos at 720p @30 FPS. The Acer Iconia A100 is the first 7 inch tablet to feature  Android 3.2 HoneyComb.  A small 1530 MHz battery powers the tablet. In terms of features we all hoped that the A100 could have given us a  lot more. I mean when you compare this to the HTC Flyer, there are features like HTC Scribe which is simply absent from the Acer Iconia A100. However, if you are familiar with Android HoneyComb then you can easily customize the tablet, add your favorite Apps and extensions.

Functionality

Being the first 7 inch tablet to run on the HoneyComb platform gives the Acer Iconia A100 an added advantage. Due to the fact that HoneyComb is much more optimized than its previous Android Versions and runs faster and smother. But there is no dedicated App Store like the new Lenovo IdeaPad K1 and the only customized application that’s available out there is Social Jogger, which combines Facebook and Twitter to share your updates all at once.

The problem with the A100 is that it’s only a good product. You need to create the product from scratch to suit your needs. While for me it’s quite easy and fun but this very reason could be problematic for people who are not so tech conscious.  On the other hand the HTC Flyer does a great job in integrating some cool customized App.

The camera quality for the Acer Iconia A100 is superb and video capture is decent as well.  The next big concern could be the battery which lasts for about 5 hours with Wi-Fi and HD playback.  Here is a list of battery life for several tablets with Wi-Fi enabled and HD playback of  a looped movie at 720p. The brightness for all tablets is set to 50 percent.  Measured in Hours.

Overall the Aspire A100 is a good stock tablet and needs a lot of software tweaks and some battery improvements to make it match up to  HTC Flyer.

Spending Tip

One of the reason the Acer Iconia Tab A100 could be your choice is the price. While the HTC Flyer and Blackberry Playbook Both cost at $499 the Acer Iconia A100 is priced quite less at around $330 for the 8GB model and $400 for the 16 GB model. So this could be a perfect gift for your loved ones. However I would recommend not to get this product unless you absolutely need a tablet and does not hold the capacity to opt for the HTC Flyer at $100 more.

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