Acer said its Iconia Tab A200 tablet will be available on Jan. 15 and be upgradable to Android 4.0, Google’s latest OS for tablets and smartphones.
The tablet has a 10.1-inch screen and is priced from US$329. A free upgrade to Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, will be available in mid-February; the tablet will initially come with the latest version of Android 3, Honeycomb.
The tablet, intended for applications such as video, gaming, social networking and Web browsing, will ship first in the U.S., but should be available in the rest of the world fairly soon, an Acer spokeswoman said.
The tablet was announced ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, which will be held in Las Vegas from Jan. 10 to Jan. 13. Acer is expected to announce tablets and ultrabooks at a press conference ahead of the show. With the slowdown in the PC market, Acer is focusing more on tablets as it tries to catch up with rivals Apple and Amazon, which lead the tablet market.
The Iconia Tab A200 has a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, which pales in overall performance compared to Nvidia’s latest quad-core Tegra 3 processor, which is in Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet. But the dual-core processor is able to provide the performance necessary for high-definition video and other tablet applications.
The tablet weighs 1.5 pounds (0.68 kilograms) and provides a battery life of about eight hours, Acer said. The display can show images at 1280-by-800 pixel resolution, and users will be able to stream high-definition video from the Netflix movie service.
The tablet has a 2-megapixel camera, 1GB of memory, one USB port one micro-USB port and wireless capabilities including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.