Acer Iconia Tab A700 With HD 1080p Display Review

The A700 ships with Android 4.0.4. Acer has confirmed plans to update the tablet to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean sometime in October. One of the more notable tweaks Acer includes is the addition of the Acer Ring. Basically, the Acer Ring is an app shortcut and carousel bookmark add-on that lets you pull up one of four applications, search the tablet, or access various Internet bookmarks. You can customize the four apps that appear in the carousel using the Settings menu. If you're a purist who doesn't want to use the Acer Ring, you can disable it using the Settings menu.

When you unlock the tablet, you'll also notice a ring-like interface that provides quick and easy access to the browser, gallery, Google search, and the camera. The A700 has five customizable home screens. Out of the box, three of these five home screens are left blank, leaving you plenty of space to add shortcuts and widgets.

As far as other add-ons and software is concerned, the A700 comes with a number of preinstalled applications and links including Acer Print, Amazon Kindle, Amazon MP3, AUPEO!, EquiView, Evernote, Files, HW Solitaire, Monopoly, Netflix, Polaris Office, Real Racing 2, VirusScan, WildTangent, and more. You can disable some (but not all) of these apps using the Settings menu if you like.

As you might guess from its name, Acer Print lets you connect supported printers to the tablet for easy printing. The Clear.fi features on the tablet have been divided into individual Photo, Video, and Music apps. One of the included apps we really liked was the Acer Files app. This file manager provides full access to the Internal Storage found on the tablet as well as access to any microSD cards. Acer Files uses a very simple user interface which is exactly what we like to see from a file manager on a tablet.

The quality of images we were able to capture using the A700's 5 megapixel rear-facing camera were on par with what we'd expect. Since the tablet's camera doesn't have an LED flash, images that were taken under low-light indoor settings were particularly grainy.

Other images taken indoors under well-lit conditions turned out quite good. Some of the outdoor images taken with strong sunlight also showed some color variations from what we would have preferred. Again, though, images were as good as other 5 megapixel cameras we've seen on other tablets.