"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein)
07/10/2015 at 12:24 • Filed to: None
2
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"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein)
07/10/2015 at 12:24 • Filed to: None | 2
| 2 |
Latest update in the saga of my looking for a 10” Android tablet that doesn’t suck: the one I !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , is actually good! So if you’re looking for a totally acceptable 10” Android tablet for not a ton of cash, by all means go ahead and pick up an !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .
Acer makes way too many different versions of their tablets all with similar names. You
do not
want any Acer Iconia Tab 10 that is not the A3-A30. All the other ones have slow MediaTek MT8127 CPUs. The A3-A30 has a much-faster Intel Atom Z3735 CPU.
So, let’s dive into the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A30!
Build Quality
Overall I’d put the Iconia Tab 10 A3-A30’s build quality in the “nice” but not exactly “premium” category. It’s not the absolute thinnest or lightest tablet out there, nor are its bezels particularly tiny. The back is plastic, but it’s nice, non-glossy plastic with a textured finish to it. It feels nice to hold, and also feels sturdy. Acer, outside the US, markets the A3-A30 as meeting Google Education standards, so they beefed up the tablet to withstand being chucked into a kid’s backpack.
Screen
Good enough, if not mind blowing. It’s a 10.1” 1920x1200 IPS LCD screen. Resolution is enough to avoid looking pixelated, but not as super-sharp as something like a retina iPad, Nexus 9, or the higher-res 10” Samsung models. Acer says there’s “zero air gap” i.e. the LCD panel is flush with the glass in front of it. I dunno if this makes much of a difference in practice but it’s nice enough to look at. The touchscreen sensor has some kind of gimmick that lets you use objects like regular #2 pencils as a stylus. Skip to 2:00 in this video to see the pencil gimmick:
The one knock is the brightness. It doesn’t get super bright. In my office with overhead fluorescent lights, I had to crank the brightness all the way up. At home in more reasonable lighting conditions, I put it down to more like 75%.
Audio
The Iconia Tab 10 A3-A30 has two front-facing speakers on either side of the screen for use in landscape orientation. They don’t make any bass, but that’s not really to be expected in a tablet. The sound they are able to produce, is mostly clear and you can turn the volume up pretty high before you get any distortion. You can definitely notice stereo sound effects when watching movies.
Battery
I haven’t really done a scientific battery test. But it seems to last a good long while. The battery is “only” 5930 mAh which is smaller capacity than several other tablets but overall the A3-A30 seems to make efficient use of the capacity it has. It is however a bit finicky about what charger you use with it. I have a random assortment of USB chargers in my house and some of the lower-powered ones either didn’t charge it up at all, or charged it very slowly. The charger included by Acer is 2.1 A and it would seem if you give the tablet anything less than that amount of power it doesn’t cooperate.
General Performance
It’s smooth. There aren’t any weird stutters or glitches. It just works. That’s really all you can ask for in a mobile device: it does what it’s supposed to and gets out of your way. A-OK.
Software
Blissfully free of bloatware! For the most part you’re on totally-stock Android Lollipop. There are absolutely zero annoying things that replace a stock Android function but are worse than the stock version. Acer pre-installs a grand total of 5 things: a clock/weather home screen widget, 2 apps for controlling gesture-based functions like double-tapping the screen to wake it up or pinching with 3 fingers to take a screenshot, a note-taking app to use with the pencil-as-stylus gimmick, and a little quick calculator/calendar/notes app that you can overlay over whatever else you’re doing. That’s it. The gesture functions are actually useful, and the other stuff stays out of the way. The one big question mark is how committed Acer will be to pushing out system updates in a timely fashion. But that’s not as much of a concern for me because the software build it comes loaded with is nice and clean.
Cameras
They exist. They’re halfway decent. The main camera is 5 MP and the selfie camera is 2 MP. You shouldn’t be using your tablet as a primary camera anyway, but for “oh look at the cat being cute and I already have the tablet in my hands” type photos, it’s ok.
Value/Conclusion
I paid !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The A3-A30 isn’t actually listed on Acer USA’s site yet, and Amazon lists it as “usually ships in 1-3 weeks” but there are several 3rd-party sellers who have it in stock. I’m sure it will become more widely available soon.
The A3-A30 is a bit unremarkable, but that’s actually a good thing! Sure you could get a higher-res screen and thinner/lighter with Samsung, but I’d happily trade down in those areas to avoid Samsung’s awful software and general lack of smoothness of operation caused by that software, and having to push all those pixels on the higher-res screen.
The A3-A30 does a great job of just doing what you expect out of a tablet with no quirks or glitches. It gets out of the way and lets you do what you want to do. Which really is all I wanted.
spanfucker retire bitch
> Textured Soy Protein
07/10/2015 at 12:44 |
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That’s not true, that’s impossible. It’s from Acer. Nothing but misery and woe comes from Acer.
And Toshiba for that matter, but that’s for another day.
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Textured Soy Protein
> spanfucker retire bitch
07/10/2015 at 13:17 |
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I’ve had good luck with Acer stuff over the years. Not everything they make is great, and they have way too many variations of the same thing, but if you pick the right one, you can get good stuff from them.