Today on my trip out and about to Hornsby Westfield I dropped into JB Hi-Fi to have a look at what they had on display and was stoked to find that they had a Android Honeycomb tablet on show in the form of the Acer Iconia Tab. Prior to today, I had never see a Honeycomb tablet up close so I was naturally curious to see how well it worked.
The model I tried was Wi-Fi only and it seems that the store didn’t have the foresight or sense to join it to a Wi-Fi network so people could actually try it out. In lieu of that I tethered it to my Samsung Galaxy S (the mobile hotspot functionality always comes in handy) and gave it a bit of a spin. Firstly, I tried internet browsing and was firstly surprised to find a very Google Chrome-esque browser presented in full screen with tabs running along the top along with the expected address bar. Pages rendered quickly and without degradation while scrolling was smooth with no noticeable jitter (however I did note that the device did have Advanced Task Killer installed to kill off long running processes on the device which is not part of the standard install).
I also tried Google Maps and that seemed to work without too many problems even though I was indoors. Maps loaded quickly and the zoom and pivot functions were quite responsive. The tablet also included Google Navigation which provides turn-by-turn directions without the need to purchase a dedicated application.
The rear camera on the tablet was rated at 5 megapixels while the front camera weighs in at 2 megapixels. The quality did seem a bit grainy for both still photo and video capture which was a little disappointing in the short amount of time I used it. There also seemed to be a bit of a delay when trying to take photos. Not too sure if this was as a result of the sensor used or the driver but it was a bit disappointing.
There wasn’t much in the way of music or video on the device so I couldn’t give that a test and I forgot to try out YouTube. What was apparent though was the Android does scale up nicely to tablet form and Google has made a good effort in tailoring their operating system for this form factor. Simply reusing the phone operating system (whilst it would work) would be a poor use of screen real estate and the extra power available in a larger device.
Speaking of size, the Iconia Tab was noticeably thicker than the iPad 2. Whilst this may or may not be a deal breaker for some people it makes me wonder how the revised Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 coming later this year will fare given that it will be roughly the same size as Apple’s tablet. Another interesting change compared to most of the Android smartphones was the absence of capacitive buttons and instead uses onscreen soft buttons in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen to move back a screen or return home.
All in all, the Acer hardware was a bit of a let down but I was pleased with what Google has offered up with Honeycomb. I’ll be interested to see where it goes from here but my next tablet device may well be an Android one.
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