At the New York Press conference Acer has announced the Iconica A1 tablet which is going to be a budget netbook. There are many other similar tablets available in the market but Acer has still dared to introduce the Iconica A1 tablet which will cost only $199. User have choices from comparable tablets like the Nexus 7, HP Slate 7, Lenovo IdeaTab A6000 and the new tablet have very few distinctive features that Acer is banking on.
The Iconica A1 tablet is equipped with a 7.9-inch IPS LED-backlit display which has a 1024 x 768 pixel resolution and sits in a 4:3 aspect ratio. The screen size and resolution is same as the iPad mini. The Iconica A1 has a solid feeling and reasonably attractive thick plastic design with a white black. The new tablet weighs 410g and is only 11.1mm thick.
It uses a quad-core 1.2GHz processor which is in line with the Nexus 7, 1GB of RAM with choice of either of 8GB or 16GB onboard storage. Acer has also provided a microSD card slot to increase the storage by another 32GB. It runs on Android Jelly Bean 4 and has a built-in 3G option in addition to b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. There’s a 5 megapixel (1080p at 30fps) camera on the rear and 0.3 megapixel front camera to make video calls. There is a micro-HDMI ports on the sides and GPS capability is also included. As per Acer, the Iconica A1′s has improved battery of seven hours of use. The tablet is going to use Andriod but not sure which version of Andriod will be used in the new tablet.
Acer has introduced a clever gesture based controls to the Iconica A1 tablet. The wake up control is a five finger tap on the tablet to bring it to life automatically. User can configure the five finger tap to specific application on the tablet. Another control is to tab with both the thumbs on the screen to open the chosen app and also let you open another application simultaneously.
Iconica A1 Launch and price
The Iconica A1 will be launched in two forms, one with Wi-Fi only arriving towards the end of May and another with a 3G option arriving in July. Costing wise also there are two options. The 16GB version will cost around $199 whereas the 8GB version will cost around $169.