AndroidTablets

Acer A200 coming January 15 for $329

We talked about the Acer A200 about a month ago, and the tablet hasn’t gotten any less pointless since then, but at least the pointlessness has an official (US) release date and price now. To recap, the Acer A200 is a budget Honeycomb tablet with a 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 screen, 1GB RAM, and Tegra 2 chipset. It’s a ridiculously thick tablet at 12.4mm, weighs way more than it should at 720 grams, and has a weak 8 hour battery that does absolutely nothing to justify the weight and thickness. There’s no back camera, and the base model has only 8GB of storage (though it does have a microSD slot).

In other words, this thing is a joke. Even at a low $329 for the 8GB model it’s actually expensive considering the specs that would have been awful even half a year ago. If you look at US prices, Best Buy sells the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus for only $20 more, and the Galaxy Tab 8.9 for only $70 more. The latter is closer in terms of screen size and resolution, has the same chipset, but has better battery, build quality, is thinner, lighter etc. The former is a lot faster, has some nice extra features (like IR remote), about the same battery life etc, but half the physical size. Both have twice the memory, so it’s more fair to compare them to the $350 16GB version of the A200. Then you have sales at woot.com and other places where devices like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 have been on sale for $330. In other words, no matter how you look at it, this is one seriously bad tablet. The only way I see it selling a single unit is in stores where everything is listed at MSRP rather than normal going rates, or perhaps in countries where tablets aren’t discounted as often/much.

At the very least Acer is promising Ice Cream Sandwich around mid-February. Watch out for the A200 itself to drop on January 15 (so you don’t buy it by accident, I mean).

[AnandTech]

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Andreas Ødegård

Andreas Ødegård is more interested in aftermarket (and user created) software and hardware than chasing the latest gadgets. His day job as a teacher keeps him interested in education tech and takes up most of his time.

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