Andrew Nimick Point Concept twitter.com/andrewnim

You may or may not have noticed that there has been a recent appearance on the market of Android tablets. Many PC manufacturers have released one or more tablets running Android Honeycombe, though only a few have released tablets with Windows.

I wanted to have a look at one of these and thanks to Werner at the Technology Center on 4th Ave (www.technologycentre.co.nz/) I got to spend a week using the Acer A500 tablet.

Now I am not a big fan of Acer to be honest, bad customer service in the past has clouded my opinion. But I was generally impressed by the build quality of the tablet. It was heavier than the iPad, but not overly so. Although as my son pointed out playing ‘Need for Speed' did get tiring as you are holding the tablet at arms length.

It got a thumb's up for games and the graphics where great. Most of the current crop of Android Tablets have the same internals with processors from Nvidia, a company known for graphics processors, and 1gb of ram.

The touch screen was good, although at times I found it a little over sensitive where you would initiate actions you did not intend to. But I have no doubt you could get used to that.

Unlike the iPad, most of the Android Tablets come with external storage capabilities, SD cards and USB connection. With this Acer, the USB did not work. I plugged a fat32 USB drive in and it failed to see it. I have read that this is an android issue with many manufacturers adding drivers and software to manage it. Maybe the Acer needed an update, but I did not get around to it.

They had added a neat virtual desktop feature which allowed you to have apps by category in a nice, easy-to-use manner.

My impression of Android Honeycombe was that it is still very early days. I noticed a lot of the apps on the Acer were actually web apps and this may be in part due to the fact that a lot of the apps for Android are made for phones and do not work so well with the tablet resolution.

So would I get an Acer tablet or an iPad?

Well, the ability to extend the storage is pretty big incentive and I liked the ‘independence' of not being locked to iTunes and a PC or Mac. But you are locked to Google as a Google account is a prerequisite.

If the tablet was $200 cheaper I would go for it over an iPad. But when it is being priced at the same level it does not make sense. The build quality is lower. The weight is higher and the quality of the apps is not there yet.

There has always been a lot of noise made in PC/ Mac comparisons over the extra cost of Apple hardware. Yet in the tablet market (a market Apple created) the PC side is as expensive.

Apple pricing is for a quality product for which they have developed an operating system and app market.

The android tablets are running an open source Linux operating system (admittedly they do tweak it) and the materials (on the Acer) were cheaper. I cannot help but feel that there is a bit of a missed opportunity here.