24-01-2012 - Keep taking the tablet!

Having deliberately avoided the tablet wars and preferring the Netbook route ( Asus in particular) for mobile technology, in late 2011 staying true to my 'Android' roots I decided to scour the market in order to see what machines using the Android 'Honeycomb' OS offered the best deals.
My choice after a good deal of 'window shopping' was the Acer Iconia A500 tablet (see below)

From the moment that I turned it on and downloaded my favourite apps ( having run the HTC Magic smartphone through to November 2011... the apps were pretty similar) I was impressed by the way the machine communicated with many of my other cloud based storage being able to sync. contacts -Android phone contacts :-) and images ( Picassa based)

The goodies just kept on coming - the Kindle app, Skype ( using front or rear facing cameras), Internet Radio, Facebook, LinkedIn... and then of course an aspect that had never really hooked me previously - games.... Angry Birds ( to which I have become addicted!),

along with a brilliant driving game from EA which makes use of the tablet's accelerometer...........pool, golf, and on and on and on!

I think in short that the tablet may well be the 'killer one stop machine'. Of course I accept that this device would not be one on which you would use to write your novel ( the WP apps are not brilliant in the free app section!) and trying to use the tablet as a camera I still find embarrassing beyond belief.....however the speed of start up, easy connectivity and simple useability make this the buy that I am glad I waited for... I now only fire up a laptop at home in order to download my iTunes Podcasts or to watch some flash video....Acer Iconia I would recommend as a great buy. 

It will be interesting to see how the next generation of 'Android' and of course tablets such as the Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy along with Acer grow in the coming years.