Acer Aims To Prove Apple Wrong with $329 7-Inch Iconia Tab A100
Posted 08/12/2011 at 5:37am
| by J.R. Bookwalter
Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his team have been quite insistent that the 7-inch form factor doesn’t make sense for a tablet, while other companies have been quite happy to give it a go. The latest is Acer, who unveiled its new Iconia Tab A100 on Friday morning, the first 7-inch to come with Android Honeycomb 3.2.
TechCrunch is reporting that Acer has announced the immediate availability of the Iconia Tab A100, a 7-inch Android tablet that marks the debut of Honeycomb 3.2 for the smaller form factor. The diminutive size also comes with a reduced price tag as well, starting at $329 for an 8GB model or $349 for 16GB.
Acer has already dipped its considerable toe into the water with the Iconia Tab A500, a 10.1-inch Android Honeycomb tablet with 16GB storage that beat the iPad 2 on price by $50. The capable tablet was marred by a lesser quality display, but appears to have gotten at least a small boost in sales for a short time due just by being in stock while cheaper competitors like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer were sold out in recent months.
Despite Apple’s insistence that the 7-inch form factor doesn’t make sense for tablets like the iPad, companies like Archos have been making them for some time with modest success. Acer’s arrival into the game is mostly one of timing, since Android Honeycomb 3.2 is ready-made for the smaller display size and the Iconia Tab A100 can boast about being first out of the gate.
Weighing just a bit under one pound, the Acer Iconia Tab A100 includes a micro USB and micro HDMI port, as well as the ability to take MicroSD cards up to 32GB, just like its 10.1-inch brother. The smaller tablet is still packing a NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM, supports media streaming through Acer’s clear.fi service for DLNA-compatible devices and features a five megapixel camera on the back. The Acer Iconia Tab A100 is on sale now at retailers across the country.
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(Image courtesy of TechCrunch)