Acer Iconia A100 in the flesh, first impressions

Found this 7-inch Acer Iconia A100 Honeycomb tablet in one of the stores in Mongkok yesterday. It’s one of those rare finds among the dozen or so tablets available locally.

The retail price was something in the range of Php19,000 when converted from HK dollars (the sales guy would not allow me to take a photo when he saw my Canon S95 but quickly positioned my iPhone 4 to get this shot).

The Iconia A100 still resembles the design and specs of its big brother, the Iconia A500. Initial impression of the performance is very similar it the A500.

Acer Iconia A100
7-inch LCD @ 600×1024 pixels
Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor
ULP GeForce GPU, Tegra 2 T20 chipset
8GB internal storage
512MB RAM
up to 32GB via microSD
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1 w/ EDR
5MP autofocus camera with LED flash
2MP front-facing camera
HDMI port
Li-Po 1530 mAh
Android 3.2 Honeycomb

The tablet is a little thick, like its 10-inch brother, at 13.1mm. The weight (470g) is just right but not that light for its size.

Despite the LCD-only display, it looks nice and crisp with great, vivid colors. It looks really nice too. I wasn’t able to play a lot with it so I wasn’t able to check video quality and camera. This is the WiFi-only model and not sure if they do a 3G version as well. So far, of over a two dozen gadget stores we visited, this is the only one that was carrying the Iconia A100 which means it’s just starting to be shipped into HK and thus the somewhat steep pricing. I reckon it would go down to as much as Php15k in the smaller, corner stores when larger shipments arrive.