As the table in AnandTech's review demonstrates, the interior of most tablets is dominated by a 1 Ghz ARM Cortex A9 with Tegra 2 doing the heavily graphical lifting. This puts the onus for standing out among the crowd on the look of the tablet and the compatible peripherals as well as the pice. Acer's design was not particularly well received at AnandTech, with several seams reducing their enjoyment of the tablet. On the plus side is the peripheral support, with HDMI and both a microSD card reader and a miniUSB port you will have no problems interfacing with your other gadgets. With a cost just under $400 AnandTech does like the tablet but they can't help but point out that with quad core ICS/Android 4.0 and Kal-El just around the corner you might want to wait for the next generation.
"Next in our series of Honeycomb tablet reviews is the Acer Iconia Tab A500. The A500 was the second Honeycomb tablet to go on sale, and is one of four on the market at present, all of which are very similar. They share basic specs—10.1” 1280x800 displays, NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 underhood, 1GB LPDDR2 RAM, 16-64GB onboard NAND, front and rear facing cameras with HD video capture, basic wireless connectivity options, and stock versions of Android 3.0/3.1 Honeycomb (albeit with different preloaded software packages). The hardware similarities makes things like design and price that much more important, and the latter is where Acer seemed to have an edge."
