Going for the gold

With a powerful processor and long battery life, the Acer Iconia Tab A510 Olympic has jumped the gun and arrived well ahead of this summer’s Games. The Wi-Fi tablet without 3G connection even has the Olympic logo printed on its back cover.

The A510 is powered by an  NVIDIA Tegra 3 Mobile Processor, which is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU running at 1.3 GHz. Its 1 gigabyte active memory (RAM) further enhances its performance. The tablet runs on Google’s Android Ice-cream Sandwich 4.0.3 operating system with Acer Ring UI.

The A510 comes with a Thin Soda-Lime 10.1-inch HD WXGA display with 1,280 x 800 pixel resolution and packs plenty of storage with 32 gigabytes, which is expandable with a microSD card.

It also houses a 5-megapixel camera in the rear capable of recording Full HD 1,080p video, while its 1-megapixel facing camera can record 720p video and supports HD video calls of GTalk and Skype.

The tablet has an impressive sound system using the Dolby Mobile system. During our test, the A510 reproduced accurate, good-quality sound from games, music files and video clips.

The tablet supports audio playback of AAC-LC, AAC, AAC+ (not RAW AAC), AMR-NB, AMR-WB, MP3, MIDI, OGG, WAV, WMA 10 formats and video playback with H.264 BP, H.264 MP, H.264 HP, MPEG-4 SP, H.263 formats.

The A510 also a mini HDMI port for connecting to a large-screen LCD or plasma TV, meaning it can also function as an HD video player or even a presentation device.

The A510 weighs about 685 grams and, at 10.95mm, is quite thin compared with earlier Acer tablet models. This is apparently because Acer has removed the full USB port from the A510 and provided a USB expansion port adapter instead.

But it’s still convenient enough to plug your flash drive into the USB expansion port and get fast access to your files on the flash drive. The expanded USB port also supports a mouse or keyboard.

The A510 comes preinstalled with the ASTRO file manager, which you can use for browsing files on your flash drive. You can also play music and video clips right away on the flash drive. Meanwhile, the preinstalled Polaris Office allows you to edit all types of Microsoft Office files.

When you start up the A510 for the first time, the Android 4 OS will prompt you to select the interface language, your country and select an available Wi-Fi network, such as your home wireless router. You will then be prompted to enter your Gmail account. Once I’d entered this information, the Android 4 OS automatically fetched my previous account setting from a test I’d done on an earlier Android 4 OS tablet. Apart from synchronising my contact list, it also installed all the applications I had installed to previous Android 4 tablets, which was very convenient.

The Acer Ring UI is also very handy. It allowed me to capture the screens easily and provided fast access to the Settings, Gallery and Browser applications. You can customise which applications you want to access through the Acer Ring. And using the Browser, you can even review the “favourite” pages you have kept.

Thanks to the quad-core processor, the A510 had seamless and quick performance during the test. The touch screen was very responsive and all the menus were fast.

Best of all, it played HD games very smoothly and very fast. I tried Dark Medow: The Pact THD, an HD game with beautiful graphic texture, and the first-person adventure game was really fluid. The Raging Thunder racing game also ran very smoothly during the test.

The A510 also played HD video clips fast without glitches during the test. HD YouTube clips also unspooled without a hitch.

The A510 comes with a rechargeable high density Li-polymer batteries 9,800 mAh (36.26 W), which Acer says can support video playback of up to 15 hours.

Acer Iconia Tab A510 Olympic retails for Bt15,900, with a free protective plastic case and anti-scratch screen cover.

 

        Key specs

_ Platform: Android Ice-cream Sandwich 4.0

_ Storage: 32GB

_ Display: Thin Soda-Lime HD Display 10.1-inch WXGA Multi-Touch screen, Resolution of 1280x800 at 149.2 pixel/inch

_ GPU: NVIDIA Geforce GPU (PC Class)

_ RAM: 1GB

_ Camera: 1MP front camera, 5MP (AF) rear camera

_ Video Recording: Full HD 1080P @ 30fps

_ Size: 260x175x10.95 mm.

_ CPU: NVIDIA Tegra 3 Mobile Processor Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU @ 1.3Ghz

_ Wireless: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n WLAN (802.11n 2.4 Ghz); Bluetooth 2.1+EDR

_ Battery: Rechargeable high density Li-polymer batteries 9,800 mAh (36.26 W)

_ Weight: 685 g.