Acer Iconia Tab A500 Android Tablet Review

Next, we'll take a look at how the Iconia Tab A500 compares to other tablets by running and examining a few benchmarks that are currently available in the Android Marketplace.

In the Linpack test, the Iconia Tab A500 outscores all of the other tablets in our reference bank. With this score, the Iconia Tab A500 shows that the tablet's 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processor really does offer some competitive advantages.

Although the Iconia Tab A500 doesn't perform quite as well in the An3DBench or An3DBench XL tests, it still posts respectable scores.

In the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, the Iconia Tab A500 performs very well, coming in just behind the Asus Eee Pad Transformer.

A Note On Battery Life: Acer says you should get up to eight hours of playback for casual games, up to eight hours of HD video playback and up to 10 hours of Wi-Fi Internet browsing from the Iconia Tab A500's two 3260 mAh Li-polymer batteries. Overall, we felt that the Iconia Tab A500's batteries held up very well during everyday use.

While using the Iconia Tab A500 for a mix of social networking, surfing the Web, checking email, watching short videos, etc., we were able to use the Iconia Tab A500 for a few days without needing to charge it. Of course, this was all dependent upon how often and heavily we used the tablet on those days. Your mileage will also vary depending on use.

In an attempt to quantify battery life and better compare one tablet to the next, we also ran the Iconia Tab A500 through our own battery test. In this test, we set up a webpage with a mix of graphics and text. The page automatically refreshed itself every three minutes. We set the Iconia Tab A500's display to 50% brightness.

For this test, the Iconia Tab A500 managed to last seven hours and 45 minutes before it died. Above is a look at how the Iconia Tab A500 compares to other tablets and smartphones we've tested using this same method.