The cake is not a lie; the Acer A100 is now out
Turns out that the cake is not a lie after all! After months and months of delays, bad information, and random setbacks, the Acer Iconia A100 is now out in the US as the first 7-inch Honeycomb tablet on the market. Aside from the screen size and 1024 x 600 resolution (which is said to be the reason for all the delays, as that resolution and screen size requires Android 3.2 for Honeycomb to work properly) it’s a fairly traditional Honeycomb tablet. Tegra 2, 2/5 megapixel cameras, mini-HDMI and the normal sensor package that you find in most tablets these days. As for the price, $329 will get you the 8GB version while the 16GB version will set you back $349 – a price difference/storage difference ratio that actually makes sense for once.
The good news ends there though. Reviews are in from various sites, and it seems that Acer failed where it matters; battery life. Reviews state anywhere from less than 4 hours to around 5, which are numbers so low that the thing is actually out-lived by many Windows tablets. 7-inch tablets in general have battery issues due to the lack of space for a proper battery pack in the smaller shells, causing them to be thicker to compensate at least a bit, but even so the A100 is bottom of the list for 7-inch tablets with the HTC Flyer, original Galaxy Tab and the Blackberry Playbook all outperforming it up to multiple times. Battery life is much of the point of a tablet, so this is very bad news for anyone who wanted one, me included. I guess Acer simply isn’t cut out for the tablet game when they release a tablet with such a ridiculous flaw even after months and months of delays.
[Droid Life]
