Acer’s Iconia Tab A700 is all set to compete with the iPad and comes at a far more affordable price. Boasting of Android 4.0 out of the box, a quad-core processor and a full HD screen, many critics are billing this device as the main competition to the iPad in the coming months.
The A700 appears much like its predecessors, the A200 and the A500, sporting a 10.1 inch screen and weighing 1.5 pounds. The A700 comes in two colours- silver and black. It’s worthy of mention how well Acer has done to improve the overall look of its tablets. Further, the A700’s display quality is far better compared to most of its Android counterparts, packing in an eye-popping 1920×1200 resolution display as compared to the usual 1280×800 found in most Samsung tablets. This apart, display is LED backlit and features a 178 degree viewing angle.
With Nvidia’s 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, the A700 is no slouch when it comes to raw power, matched perhaps only by some of Asus’ recent offerings. The Tegra 3 offers a number of advantages like enhanced battery life and greater graphical processing power as compared to dual core Qualcomm processors and the previous generation Tegra 2 chipset. Representatives at Acer claim a video play back time of 10.5 to 13 hours and an 8 hour life for internet browsing. The fact that the iPad uses a different OS makes it difficult to compare the two in terms of processor power, but it suffices to say that the A700 is a highly capable device which can handle anything thrown at it with aplomb.
The Android Ice Cream Sandwich which the Acer Iconia A700 ships with is a mostly pure version of the OS (stock). Acer has added a few apps and widgets apart from the ‘Acer Ring’ feature – a tool to browse through your favourite apps and recent activities. The A700 boasts of an internal memory capacity of 32GB, 1GB RAM and supports microSD cards up to 64GB. On the audio-visual side, the Iconia A700 sports Dolby-enhanced speakers, a 5MP camera on the rear and a 720p camera on the front. It goes without saying that GPS and Bluetooth (2.1) are a part of the deal too.
To summarize, with the Iconia A700 tablet Acer may not have beaten Apple’s iPad altogether, but it sure is giving users something comparable and at a price $50 less than the iPad. Taking into account both the price and the features, Acer might just be sitting pretty high up among Android-based tablets.
June 16, 2012 at 10:52 pm
Closest competitor? How can this be even placed in the same league with an ipad if the ipad is only dual core and this is a quad core giant? The screen resolution is also 100 times better on this then the crappy ipad will ever have.