With a geeky, tongue-in-cheek Star Trek themed product launch, Acer today brought us into "First Contact with Acer Iconia technology." So what does that mean for you?
Boldly (ahem) entering the tablet arena with a number of touch-enabled models, Acer today launched its new Iconia range, bringing us a number of new devices ranging from an Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet retailing for a (market-cheapest?) $499 and extending through to a deluxe Core i5 Windows 7 dual-touchscreen notebook sans keyboard for $2,499. In short, APC witnessed a dizzying array of touch functionality aimed at users in both consumer and enterprise markets, including a new hybrid product, the productivity-oriented W500 tablet, which runs Windows 7 and magnetically attaches to a full-size chiclet docking keyboard.
The Iconia Tab A100.
Starting things off at the ultra-affordable end of the spectrum is the new Iconia Tab A100. It's a 7-inch 1,024 x 600 Wi-Fi tablet running Android 3.0 Honeycomb. It features a pretty meagre 8GB of storage, but at only $499, it's aggressively priced and likely indeed to be the cheapest entry-level Honeycomb tablet in town when it launches next month. In fact, that storage shortcoming is the only real let-down: it runs on a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 250 dual-core CPU, includes 512MB RAM and features 5.0MP/2.0MP rear/front cameras. Not a bad spec for a 7-inch tablet, given that the original Samsung Galaxy Tab launched at double the price less than five short months ago. The A101 model has the same basic feature set but adds 3G connectivity.
The Iconia Tab A500.
The "hero product" of today's launch is the A100's big brother, the Iconia Tab A500. Available in 16 or 32GB versions and starting at $579, it sports an almost identical set of specifications but features a 10.1-inch 1,280 x 800 display. It also obviously weighs more, 700g to the A100's 450g, but still comes in at a fairly slim 13.3mm thick. Similarly to the A100/A101 breakdown, the A501 comes with 3G in addition to Wi-Fi.
The Iconia Tab W500: looks like a notebook, but actually that's a tablet docked with its matching keyboard.
Perhaps the most unique product of today's Acer launch is the Iconia Tab W500. It's also a 10.1-inch 1,280 x 800 tablet, but that's where the similarities end. Not another Android tablet, the W500 instead runs Windows 7 on an AMD Dual-Core C-50 processor with 2GB RAM and 32GB SSD storage. What really stands out however is that the W500 is made to magnetically attach to a keyboard docking station. In this sense, it's being marketed as a "100% Productivity" tablet: sure, you can play Angry Birds on the train, but dock it at your workstation when you arrive at the office and it becomes a fully-fledged Windows PC. It's an interesting feature, reminiscent of Motorola's dockable Atrix smartphone, and something we're likely to see more of as the "Post-PC product" market matures. The W500 retails for $899 and will be available in May.
The Iconia dual-screen touchbook: no physical keyboard for a touchy-feely experience.
Rounding off today's Acer launch was the new Iconia dual-screen touchbook. Strikingly reminiscent of last year's
Toshiba Libretto W100 in concept, the touchbook is essentially a notebook PC, but the physical keyboard is replaced with a secondary touchscreen, which variously provides a virtual keyboard, touchpad and additional display area. Much like with the Libretto W100, the touchbook is visually spectacular when you see one close up, but whether users will actually take to such a device is another question, particularly given the high cost of these dual-touchscreen models: the touchbook in this instance retails for $2,499. For your money you get a Core i5-460M CPU, up to 4GB of RAM and 640GB of hard disk space. Oh, and twice as many reasons not to drop it.