This is a plain language review for us ordinary folk.

Asus Iconia Tab A500 Front & Back

Top	Bottom
R Side	L Side

Click on the above links to see the connections and controls

All Photos are by Ken, About Facts Net

Have you ever felt like buying something that you had no need for, but you just wanted it to play with it? My kids think that I am the world's oldest geek because I can sit down and discuss computers with the best of them. I confess that I just might be a geek, even though I never really thought of myself as one. Anyway I decided I wanted a tablet. I didn't want an Ipad for two reasons. The first reason was that I already had a 64 gig Ipod which is very similar except for the smaller size. I decided that I wanted something with Android 3.0 on it. This meant that I had eliminated all but a few tablets already. Luckily I had some money that I received as gifts over the holidays and my birthday and I decided that there were only two tablets that I wanted to consider and they were the Motorola Zoom and the Acer Iconia Tab A500. They were both very similar. The Motorola was about $600 and the Acer about $450. The Motorola had 32 gigs of memory and the Acer 16 gigs. I settled on the Acer and here is what I found:

The Acer Iconia Tab A500 has a great screen. It is extremely high resolution and your photographs will look great on it. Here is some more great news, it has a full sized USB 2.0 slot that no other tablet has right now as of the writing of this review. I loaded some family photos on my thumb drive, plugged it in to the USB slot and they loaded after only a few seconds into the built in viewer. The screen does have one drawback, it is extremely reflective, so much so that you might have a hard time seeing something on it if you are sitting outside in direct sunlight. One of the things that I really liked about the device is that it has two cameras. One 5 megapixel camera faces away on the back and one lower resolution camera faces you. Here is the part that blew me away. The back facing 5 megapixel camera has a zoom of up to 8 times and also takes movies that look good. There is also a built in LED flash. You would have to pay at least $100 for a camera like this.

I wondered if I should go with the Motorola Zoom because it had more memory, 2X to be precise, 32 gigs, but since Acer provided a card slot to expand memory up to another 32 megs and also a USB port for a thumb drive, the choice became a no brainier. You have to remember that apps are a lot smaller than the software for computers, therefore they take up a lot less space. If you are one of those people that take style over functionality, than this device is not for you. It is just not as sexy as the Ipad in looks and much heavier. So heavy that if you try and hold it with one hand for viewing too long, you arm will get very tired. It is very solidly built however with an aluminum case. I was very particular this time and wanted a device with an HDMI connection so I could hook it up to my big television and this fit the bill since it had a miniature HDMI connection built in. I haven't tested that yet, but it should work fine. The device is wireless so making it portable. I am not worried about the power since it has a dual core Nvidia processor. This is one device that really needs a screen cover of some type because it really shows up fingerprints and has to be cleaned often.

I also wanted something with a long battery life and I found it. Acer managed to build in about 8 hours of it, meaning I could take it out and run it just about all day. It does have a bit of a learning curve, especially for those that are new to Android, but this is to be expected. The sound is the best that I have ever heard on a mobile device. It blows away even laptops with its built in stereo speakers and their high volume. You can use this device as a navigation unit since it has full GPS, but you might want to purchase a car charger if you do and you will need some way to mount the large screen. The Iconia runs on 1 gig of built in ram.

Most of us have seen the thousands of apps that are available from the Apple App store. Unfortunately people think there are just not a lot of apps available for Android 3.0 yet. When you look at the apps that are listed in the various categories it does look that way until you realize that if you click on the title bar for each type more will come up, but not a lot more. This changes when you click on the title bar for Android Widgets. There were so many that I never got to the end of the list.

I am sure more apps are being added even as I type. The tablet has a gyroscope and the screen will rotate what is being viewed depending on how you hold the tablet. The search using speech recognition is also worthy of mention. Yes you can give oral instructions but you have to be careful to be very clear in your speech. There is even an app that allows you to write notes using voice commands. The Iconia has a fairly large on screen keyboard and you should be able to do some light one finger typing if necessary, but I wasn't able to find a full word processing app for it yet, although there were some apps that allowed you to type docs but they had no options such as spell checking and formatting and a lot of other options that we have gotten used to. I have to admit however that I only looked in the FREE apps. Oh well you can always go on to one of those online word processing sites and do some cloud typing. No one else seems to have tried this, so I plugged in a USB keyboard and guess what? It worked and I was able to use it with the web browser, which means that it could be used for typing notes and such. This means that this small device can now do almost everything that the average computer user does, viewing photos and movies, word processing, and going on the Internet. It could be used as the main device for about 90 percent of all users. Throw in the still and movie cameras and you really have something.

Sometimes the sum of the parts is far greater that what we expected from them and this is one of those cases. If you look at each capability separately you might not be impressed, but when you add them all up, you have an incredible machine. Sure there is room for improvement, isn't there always? I am still trying to figure out how to download apps to only the app area and not the desktop and sometimes I can't figure out how to stop a program that is running, but I am sure that with time I will get more proficient.

Lastly I have to mention the fact that you are not going to be able to watch streaming video on sites like Netflix yet. Before this can happen with Android 3.0, these sites will have to make changes to their streaming video procedures. I mentioned this because if you are looking for a tablet to do this, Android is not the one. It only runs a limited type of streaming video and there is not that much of it on the net yet for Hollywood movies. If this is not that important to you right now, keep heart there should be quite a few sites for streaming video in the future. Netflix states that in the first quarter of next year they will have the problem fixed and YouTube videos can be watched now as they seem to work perfectly.

I think what we have here is a tablet that gives you the biggest bang for the buck.