What I have on my is Acer's rather new Iconia A500 Tablet. It's a $500 slate equipped with the following:
Two cameras (front cam @ 2MP, and rear @ 5MP)
Nvidia Tegra 2 1Ghz Dual-Core CPU
16GBs internal storage w/ up to 32GBs max via Micro SD(HC)
2GB DDR SDRAM
b/g/n wifi and Bluetooth 2.1 EDR
TFT LED @ 10.1" w/ a display resolution of 1280 x 800 (to simplify, it's capable of outputting more detail than the iPad)
1 micro HDMI port capable of 1080p output
1 Micro-USB port
1 Regular USB port (host capable)
and it weighs in at 1.5 pounds...which is on the heavy side if compared to other tablets in it's class.
Don't mind my NOT iPhone
The back looks pretty slick. Note the dual Dolby speakers
The build is rather sturdy and for a regular joe kind of LED screen, it produces a lot of nice color and imaging.
When compared to the iPad....and the blue cup
Initial reactions to the A500 was well..."meh." Let's face it (..well I should face it), the iPad has spoiled me. It is a very intuitive and responsive slate that tailors to what I need out of a mobile device. It's not a gimmick like what a lot of people use it as. Because of my iPad, I no longer have to bring my laptop to school, because I can access, create and edit .doc files (as well as powerpoint, and excel if needed). It's netflix capable, and since Apple's iCloud went into beta, I have access to my music without actually having any music on my iPad. Granted there are solutions on the Android front (like Amazon and the upcoming Google Cloud), but nothing as streamlined as the iCloud. In that respect, I have gotten spoiled over the ease of use, and vast array of tablet apps. Going back to the A500, it's not the hardware or current apps that make this tablet underwhelming. It's the amount content made exclusively for it's operating system. Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a fairly new OS, yet it's been out for almost a year, and there is little to app support for Honeycomb...of course with the exception of the apps that were designed for older builds. This tablet has great potential to rival the Xoom and even the iPad, but at it's current state, Honeycomb is holding it back. Honeycomb also seems to be a little buggy with minor response times, and processing. I played the same YouTube on the A500 and iPad, and while the A500 has much better hardware specs than the iPad, the A500 struggled to process some parts of the video and started to lag. The video even loaded and played on the A500 first, but because of the setbacks, the iPad finished first. This may be something minor, but if you really look at it, Honeycomb is just not utilizing all of the A500's power. Another issue that I found annoying is the constant crashing of certain apps. I tried to finish a little more of this review using the default browser and it kept crashing as soon as I logged in. I then tried the same thing with the Dolphin Browser app that works really well with my other Android devices. Suffice to say that the results were the same. I even tried small apps like Bug Smasher (addicting btw), and even that crashed!
While we're on the subject of power, the battery life is rated at around 10 hours with wifi enabled. Coming from an Android device, I find that hard to believe. The problem with Android is it's ability to force multitask. While improvements have been made to the built in application manager, you still need an app to manage and kill tasks if you have to. This is one of the main reasons why an iPhone can outlast an Android device. Unlike Android, iOS has a simple multitask menu that you can bring up on the fly and shut down any (or all) apps that you happen to have on. Not only will that save on system memory, you save on battery life. The Android OS is just not good at that because a lot of the apps available force data to be pushed, or for some reason that's not your own, an app is opened on it's own. This is very apparent with the A500 because I notice that it awakes on it's own indicating that an app has opened on it's own. Don't worry. It's not some hacker trying send you bullshit. It's really just how Android is built. The open source nature doesn't leave guidelines as to how an app should be built, so a lot of developers pretty much have free will over this matter.
In conclusion, IMO, blah blah blah, the A500 can be a lot better than it's current state. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad tablet. I seen far worse. The OS just doesn't seem to utilize the available hardware as well as it should. If you have the means to buy a tablet for 500 dollars, make sure you do your reading first, and know what you exactly want out of your tablet. At this price, the A500 is by no means a cheaper alternate to the iPad, and the only people I would see buying this is the hardcore Android lovers or anti-Apple folk. I can't say much to the Android fanfolk other than more power to ya, but for the anti-Apple crew, might I suggest that you wait until Windows based slate is released. In fact, if you're patient enough, Windows 8 is being designed with tablets in mind. You might want to wait on that because based on what has been shown, it looks very promising. Then again, when Windows Vista was just called Longhorn, it looked very promising as well...that until RC & Final was released and Vista took a nose dive into oblivion. And people wondered why I stuck with XP for so long...hmph.
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