Acer Iconia Tab A510 review

Acer hasn’t done much to spruce up the design of its Iconia Tab series. While the A500 offered a brushed aluminum backing and a silver bezel, the A510 opts for a soft, matte plastic. It doesn't weigh very much at 1.5 pounds, bit it is slightly heavier than competing tablets: the latest Apple iPad weighs in at 1.44 pounds. There’s nothing especially wrong with the design, but I found myself glancing wistfully over at the similarly equipped Asus Transformer Prime, which offers a sleeker design for an extra $50.

The A510’s power button and headphone jack are conveniently located on the upper left side of the tablet. It’s a fairly natural position for your hands when you’re holding it in landscape mode, and still makes sense if you feel the need to whip around to the portrait orientation.

On the right side of the tablet, you’ll find the Mini HDMI port, a MicroSD slot and a sealed SIM card slot, hidden behind a flimsy, hanging flap. The volume rocker sits on the top left edge with a rotation lock, while the Micro USB port lies underneath the tablet. The A510 lacks its predecessor’s full-sized USB port, but Acer includes a micro-USB to USB dongle in the tablet's box. The port had no trouble recognizing my USB drives.

The tablet ticks all of the appropriate check boxes, but I get the distinct feeling Acer isn’t really trying here. The build quality isn’t bad, by any means — the tablet is sturdy without the slightest bit of flex, and very little about it feels cheap or misplaced. It all just looks and feels a bit dull, and that aesthetic angle counts. The best the A510 does for flair is the Olympic logo that shares space with the Acer logo on the rear, highlighting Acer’s partnership with the London 2012 Olympics. This is a bizarre little homage, that probably should have been left to a collector’s edition. It doesn’t detract from the overall look of the tablet, but once the Olympics are over (or Acer’s partnership ends) you’re left toting a strange advertising relic.

The A510 ships with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. The latest version of the Android OS offers considerable stability and performance enhancements over its predecessor, Honeycomb. Acer has only made one significant modification to the stock experience, bundling in its Touch Ring overlay. The Touch Ring works rather well: when unlocking the device, a ring with four application shortcuts appears; slide your finger towards a particular app, and you’ll jump directly to it from the lock screen. You can customize the apps that appear in either ring through the tablet’s settings menu. If the device is already up and running, a small green button sitting in the lower center of the screen will bring up a ring with four application shortcuts, and a stack of locally-stored browser bookmarks.

Acer has tacked a bit of bloatware onto the A510, but there’s nothing too egregious here. Clear.fi is Acer’s DLNA app, designed to share media across devices that are also using the app. If you’ve got lots of Acer gear, you’re in luck; if not, it’s still a pretty serviceable media browser. LumiRead is an ebook marketplace that offers nothing over Google Books, while AUPEO! serves up nothing you weren’t already getting from Pandora or Google Music.

Acer Print allows wireless or USB printing with supported devices, while Polaris Office is a full fledged Office suite. The only app that could foreseeably get in the way is the McAfee Virus Scan Mobile monitor, which constantly lurked in the multitasking bar or scanned files when I worked with the tablet. All told, it’s not bad: while few things are actually useful, there isn’t anything that can’t be ignored or immediately excised from the device.

The five megapixel rear camera is positioned in the center of the tablet’s top edge, and while you’ll feel no less awkward for strutting around with that 10-inch viewfinder, it makes composing shots a bit easier than its predecessor. That said, the camera performs about as well as you can expect from an Android tablet — photos are grainy, with muted colors, and generally underwhelming. The autofocus is appreciated, but feels a bit sluggish. The zoom functionality is worthless: magnify your shot even slightly, and pictures become garishly pixelated. The A510 can record 1080p video, but you’ll encounter the same limitations as still photography. Your best bet will be to find a bright, outdoor area if you want to do some shooting. The A510 lacks an LED flash (its predecessor had one), so low-light action is out of the question.

The fixed-focus, one megapixel front facing camera is a bit off-center, listing just to the right of where your eyes might fall naturally. It’s actually perfect for getting that grainy, washed out MySpace angle for your self-portraits or video chats.