Yep, it’s a gadget flood going on right now, alright. Does anyone know if there’s some big consumer electronics convention coming up or something? Acer has a new tablet out that runs Android and comes in at $330. The Iconia Tab A200 (apparently named by picking letters out of a sack of Scrabble tiles) has a 10-inch screen and runs 1080p video so it has a lot more going for it than a mini-tablet like the Kindle Fire. It has a front facing camera but no rear facing one so it’s no good for photography but okay for video chatting or uncontrollable narcissism. Runs on the Honeycomb operating system now but can upgrade to the new Ice Cream Sandwich OS next month.
I don’t write up every new tablet that comes across the transom but I think this one is significant, not so much for the features but for that price point. We’re starting to see a lot of variety in tablets and mini-tabs and that $500 barrier the iPad set is getting punctured. What this means is that more people will be able to get tablets and they’ll become more common. It’s also, I think, kind of a real threat to the iPad, at last. We’ve already seen how Android phones have really surpassed iPhones in overall popularity. Could this Acer tablet signal a similar thing in tablets?
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