Just got my Acer Iconia 500. my first Honeycomb tablet

[Drillbit]

It would almost not happen if my brother didn't invite me for lunch, and if we didn't start talking about gadgets. Considering that I was in K-Mart last Friday and didn't see anything, he told me yesterday, that a bunch of Acer tablets appeared in K-Mart and by next day, only one was left. After lunch, I simply had to go down to K-Mart to see for myself. And indeed, there was the last one. It was supposed to go on sale on Monday for $50 dollars less, but with only one left there was no point in it anymore. But they still gave me the sale price for it, which is a nice $399. So yeah, I am very happy. The only other Honeycomb tablets on island were Motorola Xooms, and they are much more expensive, being sold with carriers, and with 3G and all that, demand that you tie the knot on a data contract as well.

The whole device is light. Don't expect iPad class build though, but the brushed aluminum all along the back doesn't make it feel that cheap either and doesn't make it slippery too. This is Acer, not Apple. I never expected a jewel, just a good quality appliance that works. People I talked to in Google+ asked why I didn't wait for an Asus Transformer or Galaxy Tab 10.1, I said, I don't pay attention to the plate where I eat my steak in.

It certainly boots up rather quickly, and the screen is typical of Acer, brilliant sharp, with deep saturated colors. Even on their netbooks which I use, I always like their screens. The 1280x800 resolution makes a Honeycomb tablet sharper than the iPad 2, but it comes with a price --- higher resolution also means greater overhead for the GPU, which can cause screen lag in some occasions. We will get back to that later.

If you are used to Android on a smartphone, Honeycomb is a total shock. You understand that all the principles of the OS is still there, but all the buttons and displays are in very different places. Not clustered on the middle bottom of the screen, the buttons are separated in all four corners of the tablet which is actually more ergonomic if you hold the tablet in both hands. From there, its easy to access the buttons. The notification is no longer a curtain that drops from the top, but a pop up menu at the right lower corner.

The general experience is that everything is zippy. Until you put living wallpaper that is. Thanks to the high pixel resolution, what looks smooth on a smartphone, causes lag and framerate drops on the tablet. This thing still yearns for more powerful GPUs if you like smooth live wallpapers on an Android tablet. But in the meantime, the advice is don't.

When I start installing apps, everything downloads and installs extremely quick. Its like the app successfully installs even before you leave the page. It is in my experience with the Galaxy S2, that the multithreaded file I/O introduced with Gingerbread and above, makes it ideal for dual core processors. Its definitely true here.

Regular Android apps would run on the tablets. Unlike the iPad though where the smartphone app will only appear on the center with large black borders around it, the Android smartphone app would scale up and fill the entire screen. It sometimes gives the app a look that seems it wastes a lot of blank space, but in some cases, like with social networking apps, when you view the time streams, they actually look a lot better.

A check on the Android Market suggests that over 10,000 apps have the title suffix --- "for Tablets" in them but by no means they are the entirety. I'm pretty sure there are other tablet friendly apps that don't advertise "for tablets" in their title, such as Tweetcomb, which is a Twitter app for Honeycomb. Android Market on Honeycomb looks much nicer than on the 2.x devices, but it needs a separate category for native tablet screen apps.

Despite that most Android smartphone apps do run on tablets edge to edge, some Android apps are blocked from running on tablets. To my dismay, both the Facebook app and the AMEX app are among them.

I do have to say, some of the Google apps look really good on the tablet, especially GMail, Youtube, Earth and Maps. If you are a heavy GMail user, you are going to love the built in app.

(con't)

[brickman65]

Sounds like you got a good deal on a good Tablet DB! Can't wait to hear more.

[Drillbit]

Now for the fun part, which is running the benchmarks.

If you are running graphical based benchmarks, you will be disappointed. The higher resolution imposes overhead on the processors that no smartphone screen does, and they suffer as a resuilt. Quadrant for example, is just above my single core Nexus S scores, and way lower than that of a Tegra2 smartphone like the Atrix or Optimus 2X. I've already experienced something similar running benches on my formerly Galaxy Tab 7", even though, both tablets do give a good better impression in swiping speed than the smartphones.

But it is when it comes to running browser based benchmarks that the Iconia Tab (and likely its Honeycomb siblings) devastate their Android 2.x brethren. With Sunspider, I am astounded by the 2193 score I got, which is much faster than the 3000 to 3200 score I get with my Galaxy S2 (lower is better). The Atrix and other Tegra2 phones are scoring around 3600 to 4000 on that, and the HTC Sensation is scoring over 4000.

Sunspider is a Javascript test Apple cooked up. So let's try a browsermark that Google cooked up --- V8. With my Galaxy S2, I got 351. On the Iconia Tab, 751. Higher is better here this time. Again, a big result, despite 200Mhz slower.

Running Qualcomm's Vellamo web benchmark, which you can find as a free app on the Android Market, I got nearly a thousand, just slightly lower than the highest score by the Galaxy Tab 10.1. It matches that of my SGS2, despite being 200Mhz slower, and definitely quite ahead of other Android dual core smartphones. This shows you much more web optimized the OS and the browser is, and this gives you a glimpse what they might do with future Android versions.

Testing the HTML5 compatibility, without any tuning of settings on the browser, I get 182 on my Android smartphone browsers in general, but the Iconia Tab's browser gets 222. As a note, the iOS 4.x browser is around 206. This is okay but it can certainly be better, the Blackberry 6 and 7 browsers are scoring noticeably higher (270+), with the Meego browser on the Nokia N950 having the highest score of any mobile browser (290+), until iOS5 comes that is (300+). The browser on the Windows Phone 7 Mango is just 140 by the way while current WP7 phones are under 25.

We know Google can, since Google Chrome 12 scores over 320+ in this test. 400 is the perfect score.

In general, I am quite happy with the built in browser, and this is probably the first Android I am not downloading Dolphin browsers to replace the built in ones. There is plenty of options in the built in browser. and it offers tab browsing. But if you don't like that, consider the Maxthon browser for tablets an alternative.

(con't)

[KSD]

don't you haev staples? they got for 300 with coupon

[Drillbit]

When I first got the device, it was running on Android 3.01. I immediately got a notification while setting up the device on wifi. A humongous 357mb download across the wireless directly into the device. No PC intervention needed. And this thing updates really quick, and is up in no time with Android 3.1.

I have to say the OS is pretty stable so far. No reboots or even fast UI resets. I don't get force closes in my apps except on Google+ which is still a beta, and the rate of FC on that app is no different from my smartphones.

Battery as it turns out, is quite impressive too. I must say I am dismayed that the thing only charges by its own battery charger and not by the USB port, which means I have to get a spare charger. Or acquire the optional dock that also has its own charger.

There is a number of built in games, plus some game center for the Tegra2 that boasts console graphics quality games. I have yet to try them either but eager.

[Drillbit]

don't you haev staples? they got for 300 with coupon

Not on this island.

[jigwashere]

If you are running graphical based benchmarks, you will be disappointed. The higher resolution imposes overhead on the processors that no smartphone screen does, and they suffer as a resuilt.

If I were to get the Iconia, I would want to watch movies on it. Does the Iconia do a reasonable job playing videos?

[Drillbit]

Quite so. I plan to use it that way. In fact one of my requirements for a tablet was the ability to play Flash and Youtube.

[Mi An]

I don't know much about live wallpaper, like what format it's in, but I'm kind of stunned that it gives tegra 2 trouble, even at your resolution. Indeed, I wonder if there is a software/ROM issue.

In the meantime, I see sd'ers are getting the transformer 16gb at office depots with price matching. Once again steeling myself to wait for amazon to make a showing.

[questionfear]

I don't know much about live wallpaper, like what format it's in, but I'm kind of stunned that it gives tegra 2 trouble, even at your resolution. Indeed, I wonder if there is a software/ROM issue.

In the meantime, I see sd'ers are getting the transformer 16gb at office depots with price matching. Once again steeling myself to wait for amazon to make a showing.

Live wallpaper gets balky on my NOOKcolor as well. My assumption is that the wallpapers were designed for phones, and stretching the animation over a larger area brings out more flaws.

Or, you know, LW is just a buggy concept. I've used it on and off but found that in general they slow my Droid (and homescreen redraw) way, way, way, down after a bit.