Acer Iconia Tab A101

The Acer Iconia Tab A101 is almost the exact same Android Tablet as the Iconia Tab A100. They both have a 7-inch screen, run Android 3.0, have a 5MP camera, 2MP front camera, HDMI-out, and other decent connectivity specs powered by a 1GHz dual core processor. The difference is that the A101 has cellular connectivity and GPS whereas the A100 is Wi-Fi only.

The 7-inch capacitive touchscreen offers a resolution of 1024x600 pixels -- not bad, but you'll find it a bit wanting on detail, and small print can look a bit blurry. It's nicely sensitive though, responding well to brushes and presses.

The overall performance of this tablet is actually really good in its class, probably the best when this tablet made its first debut a few years ago. Thanks to its dual-core Tegra 2 processor that is clocked at 1GHZ per core and ULP GeForce GPU, this tablet is blazing fast even for doing some heavy tasks.

The Iconia A100's Achilles heel, and the reason it isn't getting an Editors' Choice nod, is its poor battery life, thanks to a smaller-than-usual 3060mAh battery. (Most tablets have 4000mAh or larger batteries.) We only got 3 hours, 53 minutes of video playback on a charge, not enough for a cross-country flight.

The Acer Iconia Tab A100 is easy to hold, small enough to take everywhere with you and fast enough to make using Android Honeycomb 3.2 a treat. You will, however, have to put up with very narrow viewing angles and below average battery life.