Power in its punch

A10-inch tablet computer with a full-HD display and a powerful processor, the Acer Iconia Tab A701 is ideal for enjoying videos and other multimedia content.

The 10.1-inch LED-backlit Active Matrix TFT LCD screen is powerful and bright, with 1,920 x 1,200 pixel resolution and 16.7 million colours in 16:10 aspect ratio.

The tablet is powered by a fast quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 1.30 GHz and equipped with 1 gigabyte of RAM and 32 GB of onboard storage that can be expanded with a microSD card.

The A701 comes with both 3G connection and Wi-Fi connection. The 3G connection is only for data use as there is no voice call function with the tablet.

I tested the A701 on TrueMove H’s HSPA+ 3G network. Web pages, like those at The Nation’s nationmultimedia.com, loaded very fast and YouTube clips also ran smoothly. Applications were downloaded and installed fast.

I managed to update my Foursquare and Facebook statuses fast and uploaded snapshots captured by the A701 to both my Foursquare and Instagram accounts at an impressive speed. The A701’s 5 megapixel camera also captures clean and sharp photos in a well-lit environment.

The A701 comes with all necessary connection parts, including a 3.5mm stereo jack for your premium headphones, and a micro USB port for connecting to your desktop computer. There is also a micro HDMI port for connecting to your LCD or Plasma TV, meaning that you can use the tablet as a HD movie player although you will need to buy a micro HDMI cable separately.

A701 runs on Google Android 4.04 operating system, whose user interface is already intuitive to use. On top of the Android UI, the A701 uses Acer Ring interface.

The Acer Ring, which is customisable, provides shortcuts to Google Search, Gallery, Setting, Screenshot utility and Browser as well as volume control. The applications for the shortcuts can be changed through the Setting control. Acer Ring is displayed as a form of a giant ring on the screen and you can turn it to browse through the history of web pages you have visited so that you can jump back to the page whenever you want.

The Screenshot utility is very useful, allowing you to capture the screen by just tapping it rather than having to press a combination of buttons. You bring up the Acer Ring simply by pressing the small green icon in the middle of the bottom of the screen.

The A701 also comes with Acer’s clear.fi utilities for streaming music, video files and photos to and from other computers in your home network and to a TV that supports the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) wireless connection standard.

During the test, the A701 played HD YouTube clips smoothly and beautifully. And extensive graphic games, such as Real Racing 2 ran very smoothly. You can also used the pre-installed NVIDIA Tegra Zone app to download or buy more graphics games, which are optimised for the Tegra 3 processor.

The A701 has good sound quality thanks to its Dolby Mobile sound technology. And I enjoyed using the A701 to play music with its Music app. The app displays the album cover on the left and the list of the tracks with the length of the tracks, artist’s name and genres of the music on the right, I exactly the same way as it looks on an iPod screen or iTune screen. I tested it with my Sony premium earphones and really enjoyed the music quality.

Acer ICONIA TAB A701 is available in black and silver and has a suggested retail price of Bt18,900.

 

         Key specs;

_ OS: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

_ Networks: GSM 850/900/1800/1900; UMTS/HSDPA/HSPA+ 850/900/ 1900/2100

_ CPU: .3 GHz Quad Core (NVIDIA Tegra 3)

_ Memory: 1 GB RAM

_ Storage: 32 GB internal storage, expandable with microSD card up to 32GB

_ Display: 10.1-inch LED-backlit Active Matrix TFT LCD screen with 1,920 x 1,200 pixels

_ Camera: 5 megapixel rear camera, 1 MP front camera

_ Sensors: Gyro sensor, G-Sensor, Ambient Light sensor, Digital Compass

_ Connectivity: GPS, Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi b/g/n, HDMI, USB micro with Full-size USB adapter

_ Dimension: (WDH) 259.08 x 175.26 x 10.92 mm

_ Weight: 667.78 g