A700 arrived today.

[icebike]

I've had an A500 since they were first released, very happy with it, when I can pry it loose from wifie's hands.

So I ordered the A700 direct from Acer the first day of pre order availability.

Its to be delivered today.
I'll post my impressions later.

Hopefully many others are getting their "first customer" delivery today.

Sent from my HOX

 

[icebike]

This A700 is quite a step up from the A500 in terms of build quality and appearance.

Its quick and responsive.

Down side issues:

1. The tablet is delivered with Text size set to larger than the default. This causes the tablet to spend time re-sizing all text, causing word wrap in some games, and slower response to repaints. Setting this to the default text size in settings fixes this, and game play is much improved, as well as scrolling home screens.
   
2. Scrolling web pages is not as smooth as it should be, but I suspect this is a software issue that will be fixed at some point in time.
   
3. The Touch screen occasionally misses the first tap. Your first touch needs to be ever so minutely longer in duration, even with screen sensitivity set high (it actually makes no difference what you set sensitivity to).
   
4. The auto-brightness setting is too dim in almost any light, so I just use a manual setting.
   
5. You can't charge and transfer data via USB at the same time.

Note: The Charging port is not a standard USB port, but it supports micro USB devices. There is a boatload of pins behind these for the charger cable and perhaps future docks. The charger cable will not fit in a standard USB port on other devices which is good because its a 12 volt 1.5 amp charger.

Up side
Other than than its an awesome device.

Its almost a pure Android ICS device.

All of the ports supported by the A500 are also supported on the A700, but now it uses a supplied Dongle for standard size USB devices.

The front facing camera is better than the one on my HOX, and Google Talk with video works very well. The Back camera seems un-improved over the one on the A500, and lacks a lot of tweaking controls, which is easily fixed by installing another camera from the market.

The ring lock screen is cool, but nothing to gush about IMHO.

Sound is better than the A500. The bottom edge mounted speakers manage to deliver stereo sound at typical reading distances. Even better if a table is below you to use as a sounding board.

All the little problems that affected some A500s are gone:
The microphone now works perfectly.
The Compass works perfectly.
The GPS works perfectly.


It comes with a File manager built in, which seems fairly functional. I still prefer ES File Manager, but the Acer one handles external media perfectly as it is plugged in, as well as the MicroSD card.

When I set up the tablet, it offered to sync my applications that had backup settings stored on my Google account. I checked yes, and it proceeded to download and install a couple dozen apps (including the wrong version of Swiftkey) very quickly. Because it was my HTC One X that was synced with Google, I got the phone version installed, rather than the tablet version. A quick swap in the market and all is well. Just something to be aware of.

Not too much bloatware, Acer seems overly proud of the Zinio app (Magazines subscriptions - Remember magazines? How quaint).
It also came with a auto racing game, (trite as always), and WildTangent games (I will never trust that company after the malware they foisted years ago). These are easily disabled, even if you can't delete them without rooting the tablet (and thereby cutting yourself off from OTA updates).

The screen is awesome full 1080x1200.

All in all a nice step up from the A500. It will probably get beat up in the price wars if Google comes out with anything bigger than 7 inch.








Sent from my A700 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Captain Crypto]

I've been waiting for your follow-up post! Thanks for the info.

I'm in the market for my first tablet, and while the eventual new Asus looks good I do like the A700 specs. So, in your opinion, is this tablet worth buying? I'll be using it pretty heavily for work and play.

Thanks again!

 

[icebike]

I've been waiting for your follow-up post! Thanks for the info.

I'm in the market for my first tablet, and while the eventual new Asus looks good I do like the A700 specs. So, in your opinion, is this tablet worth buying? I'll be using it pretty heavily for work and play.

Thanks again!

Yeah, I think Its worth it. You might wait till they get out to distribution and see if you can get a better price (Acer controls price pretty tightly), or if you want a 7 inch, see what Google is going to offer next week.

 

[Captain Crypto]

Yeah, I think Its worth it. You might wait till they get out to distribution and see if you can get a better price (Acer controls price pretty tightly), or if you want a 7 inch, see what Google is going to offer next week.

Thanks, but I pulled the trigger on it. $450 is a fair value for me considering the specs and what it will do for me. The screen size is great for what I'm looking for.

 

[pounder001]

Been playing with mine for 2 days now, and its not too bad. Side by side to my iPad 3, it is much thicker and a tad bit heavier in my opinion.
Acer did a great job on the screen the colors are vivid, crisp and clear, and the A700 runs like a champ, not sure I will keep it but for someone without a tablet this is a great choice in a 10.1" tablet.

 

[icebike]

Once I got to the place where I could actually put it down and stop playing with it 24/7, I find I can easily get two days of use out of it, reading the web about an hour, some tune in radio or Google Play music, a couple of light weight games, email, etc.

The battery life is way better than my A500 (which was still pretty good).

I did get the new version of Google Earth to lock up. The prior version worked just Fine.

 

[cherinal]

Re: A700

[*]Scrolling web pages is not as smooth as it should be, but I suspect this is a software issue that will be fixed at some point in time.

Wow, thanks for the comprehensive review! I wish Acer bumped up the RAM to 2 gb though, would have probably prevented this sluggish performance...