Internetpilot's new toy: Acer Iconia A500 Tablet

[internetpilot]

Yes, Acer definitely messed with something in the kernel to get better battery life, but I've noticed a screen flicker (only sometimes) that was never there before. It's typically not when it's important (like not when watching a movie, playing a game, etc.) -- I usually notice it on like the settings screen.

There's a couple of obvious battery savings changes that are annoying though. One of them is that when I'm watching a YouTube or other online video that's rather long, the screen will dim and then turn off. It never did this before ICS, so something changed where ICS no longer considers something like a flash video to "activity" enough to keep the screen on.

Otherwise, I'm loving it and consider it to be at least an incremental improvement. I'd love it more on my HTC EVO 4G phone, but HTC has already said that's not going to happen so I'll have to wait for CM9 or some other AOSP ROM for my "ancient" EVO 4G.

[Varjak]

IP, that's one of the things I notice on a lot of devices; the inability to recognize streaming or playing a file from memory as activity. You'd think that would be one of the bigger things developers would look for.

[Drillbit]

Got my Acer Iconia A500 back from my daughter though not before she loaded with well over a hundred games. She thought it was too large and prefers to stick with her 7" Galaxy Tab (the first one) which I had upgraded to Gingerbread. At this point, she doesn't seem to want an iPad either, so I gave her some money to buy a Galaxy Note instead.

Anyway I reset everything, wiped out all the day, and used the Google Cloud to restore all my apps in one sitting. Strangely enough, Google's backup backed up preloaded stuff from my Asus Transformer Prime and installed it on my Acer. It also installed stuff that I didn't install on any of the tablets but I did install on my Galaxy Nexus. Which saves me the hassle later. My guess is that the backed up image in my Google account is actually a composite of all the devices I currently own.

Battery life is much better now, and the tablets (both A100 and A500) feels like they added two more cores. Its that zippy. Visual improvements, not that much since both Honeycomb and ICS look alike, and I actually did like HC's way of managing widgets more. The swipe to remove notifications and tasking apps was very logical --- superior to the flowing card view scheme used on WebOS, also devised by the same person, Mattias Duarte. While the interface feels zippy, the benchmarks don't seem to show any improvement if any at all over Android 3.2.1.

Overall, both devices are very stable and seems to have been given new life by the upgrade. I have the feeling that an ICS tablet only needs at least a dual core to be happy, and if you are in a budget, a dual core Ice Cream Sandwich tablet can handle things perfectly without resorting to a quad core, whose prices are starting to creep down anyway. But you must insist that if you want to buy an Android tablet, it has to come with Ice Cream Sandwich or something that will immediately upgrade to that.

[Drillbit]

Android apps are not optimized for speedy PC drive access if you hook up an external hard disk to an Acer Iconia Android tablet. However, Acer packages an app that does read drives very fast and very well. Its called clear.fi and it comes on every Acer tablet. It browses the hard disk, indexes for pictures, music and videos much faster than the generic Google bundled apps.

Clear.fi is also found in many Acer notebooks. If an Acer notebook is running with clear.fi in it, it would appear on the clear.fi app on the Acer tablet as an icon if both are running on the same network, allowing for file transfers and plays. The other way also works for the Acer notebook with the Acer tablet, and across multiple Acer devices with DNLA support.

[internetpilot]

Just FYI, the techies on XDA have put up several new versions of the unlocked ICS bootloader for the Acer AXX devices. I was running the "original" v3, and just updated to v6. Apparently, once you get v4 or newer you can simply just flash an update.zip via your custom Recovery of choice, but because I was way down on v3 I had to go through the APX process again. No biggie though -- it went very smooth, my ROM/apps weren't wiped by the upgrade, and now that I'm running v6 any future bootloader updates will just be ez-peezy flashable via ClockworkMod.

[holvoetn]

You have a reference to that thread ?

[internetpilot]

Oops, sorry about that, H! I know that XDA can definitely get a bit cluttered and hard to find stuff. There are several, but here's a link to the guide I used:

[GUIDE]A500/501/G100W-Installing ICS V6 UNL BL & CWM Or back to HC BL(21-5-2012)

This one seems to be updated most frequently and is typically the most active, so if you get stuck in the process you can usually get a helpful response withing minutes of posting. I also noticed that noobie questions seem to be a little better tolerated in that thread.

[internetpilot]

Also FYI, there are now three different custom recoveries that work with the unlocked ICS bootloader:

1. Thor's ClockworkMod Recovery
2. EZTerry's PubRecovery (a modified version of ClockworkMod with source available to anyone)
3. TWRP (TeamWin Recovery Project -- a very different but successful/stable recovery)

At this point, I don't think the necessary modifications have been made to Amon RA Recovery for it to be used with the unlocked ICS bootloader. I'm bummed, because that's the one I like the most. I might give PubRecovery a try -- I was using one of EZTerry's ROMs on my A500 for many months. He does great work and supports it well.

You install your choice of the above three recoveries as part of the ICS bootloader process. It depends on which batch file you run in Step 6.

[thwak]

Very late to the party, but I just picked up a refurbed A500 32g direct from Acer on eBay for $250, so I am quite greatful for this very informative thread. As it is my first Android device, I am a complete newb to the whole rooting/bootloading thing, so have some research ahead of me.

Not too concerned as I hacked all my Palms over the years (still use my LifeFlash daily). So I'm looking forward to this strange new world with this great device!

[internetpilot]

It's a little more difficult to root and custom ROM this device than it used to be, but it's definitely do-able by anyone remotely techie-ish. My link a couple of messages above will still take you to the latest version of the ICS Bootloader, etc -- everything you need to get rooted.

Even though Acer hasn't seen fit to produce a Jellybean upgrade for us yet (supposedly it's coming), there are already quite a few Jellybean ROMs available for us, and that's not including CyanogenMod. I tried a couple of Jellybean ROMs on my A500, but didn't like them as much as the tweaked out Icecream Sandwich ROMs that are available. Personally, my daily driver is by a gentlemen on XDA named Civato -- it's MUCH faster than the stock ICS ROM that I was running since it was first released. And I mean the difference between night and day type of faster. When I tried the same developer's Jellybean ROM, it slowed it back down and I just couldn't have that.

I still love this tablet. I might have to look into the eBay thing, especially if it's coming refurbished directly from Acer. My two sons are "over" their NookColor tablets and mostly use my Acer A500, which I don't find myself using that much anymore now that my phone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 "Phablet" (AKA, big honker phone). They would definitely appreciate getting one of these to use instead.