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Acer Iconia Tab A510 puts a quad-core Tegra 3 behind Android 4.0 (hands-on)

Acer Iconia Tab A510 puts a quad-core Tegra 3 behind Android 4.0 (hands-on)

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The Acer Iconia A510 made an appearance at Nvidia's booth at CES 2012. The quad-core Tegra 3 tablet performs well, but lacks the features necessary to stand out from the crowd.

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Gallery Photo: Acer Iconia A510 pictures
Gallery Photo: Acer Iconia A510 pictures

Just as with the original Acer Iconia A500, Nvidia is the first to publicly show off its followup: the Acer Iconia Tab A510. The chipmaker is obviously interested in showing off the power of the quad-core Tegra 3 processor inside, clocked at 1.3GHz. In that regard, Ice Cream Sandwich seemed to run quite smoothly and a couple games we tried performed well. Of course, the A510's predecessor also managed to look good with Nvidia's handpicked games but didn't really stand up to long-term use — and the fact that we found some touchscreen accuracy issues on this floor model doesn't bode well. We should be looking at a 1280 x 800 screen instead of the A700's 1920 x 1200, so the A510 is clearly coming in at the mid to low end of Acer's tablet lineup. The hardware is not especially endearing on this 10-inch tablet, but mainly because it's not trying to make any kind of statements. Though there is a nice rubbery coating to the back of the tablet, it's otherwise a somewhat thick, straightforward black slab.

On the software side, we are fairly close to a stock version of Android 4.0.1. Acer's main contribution is a center button in the middle of the bottom bar, which launched a circular toolbar with access to bookmarks, volume, search, screenshot functionality, and a few shortcuts. With any luck, that relatively minor customization will mean that Acer will be able to keep the tablet up to date as future Android versions are released.


Acer Iconia A510 pictures

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