Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it’s easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don’t escape without notice, we’ve gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
Acer is gearing up to drop another all-in-one PC ‘AZ3770-H14D’ into the market. Specs-wise, this space-saving machine is equipped with a 21.5-inch 1920 x 1080 Full HD display, a 2.50GHz Intel Celeron G540 processor, an Intel H61 Express Chipset, a 4GB DDR3 RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a webcam, a DVD Super Multi Drive, an SD card reader, WiFi and runs on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (SP1) OS. The AZ3770-H14D will hit the market from June 29th for around 55,000 Yen (about $694). [Acer]
Ready for some more LCD monitors from Acer? The company has taken the wraps off additional entries into the V5 series, bringing the total number of monitors up to six. The three new sizes on offer include 18.5-inches, 20-inches, and 23-inches. Acer say that the V5 series is perfect for those who don’t have a lot of room to play with, and you’ll find all the usual array of ports.
The V195HQL 18.5-inch model comes with a 1366×768 resolution, response time of 5ms, and includes VGA and DVI ports. The DVI port also supports HDCP, so you can feed the monitor with a signal from a set top box or Blu-ray player without content protection kicking in. The V205HL, meanwhile, comes with a 1600×900 resolution, and the V235HL steps it up to 1920×1080.
All the monitors come with a 100 million:1 dynamic contrast ratio, but Acer didn’t provide real world numbers. Brightness is said to be 250 cd/m2, and viewing angles come in at 170 degrees for the horizontal and 160 degrees for the vertical planes. Power consumption varies between the three models, with the monitors consuming between 0.28W and 0.51W when off, and 16.5W and 28.2W when active.
There’s no word on when you’ll be able to pick up these new models, or how much they’ll cost either, but keep an eye out if they sound like a good fit.
Netbooks – do people still use them? I guess the answer would be “Yes”, although a resounding one it is not. The Acer TravelMate B113 is the latest netbook from the Taiwanese computer manufacturing company, where it will come along with an 11.6″ display alongside an Intel Celeron B877 processor – definitely not the fastest chip on the block by far, but it offers decent levels of performance for its product category. This particular netbook is also said to be a wee bit heavier compared to your regular netbook, but it will lack a DVD drive which some of us find essential. Unfortunately, you can strike the TravelMate B113 out of the Ultrabook list, as it fails to make the grade in terms of thickness.
Basically, some folks think that the Acer TravelMate B113 is a device that is in no man’s land. It is no Ultrabook, has less battery life than a regular netbook, and lacks an optical disc drive that notebooks come with. I guess it will be an extremely niche market for someone to fork out around $700 (max) for this puppy, where it will feature 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, Wi-Fi and USB 3.0 connectivity, and HDMI support. You can opt for the more souped up versions of that feature a 1.3GHz Pentium B967 or a Core i3-2377M that runs at 1.5GHz.
4GB of RAM, half a TB of storage, Sandy Bridge and an 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 panel starting at €450 (about $563), sounds like a pretty sweet deal on a last-gen ultrabook right? Well, Acer’sTravelMate B1113 is actually brand new and, as you dig a little deeper into the specs, this one sounds more like a rather hefty netbook. And we do mean hefty — this laptop apparently tips the scales at 1.88 Kg, which puts it a touch over the four pound mark. 4.1 pounds certainly isn’t shoulder busting, but it’s a solid half a pound more than you’d expect from a machine of this size. Then there’s the fact that the base model ships with a 1.4Ghz Celeron, and the top shelf €560 version (roughly $700) only sports a 1.5GHz Core i3. We haven’t been able to dig up the dimensions on this sucker, but the press pics don’t make it look particularly bulky. We can only assume, given its considerable weight and diminutive size, that the chassis is made of cast iron. On the plus side, it does have a matte screen… that’s gotta count for something, right?
We’ll skip the long contextual intro about how high-powered Tegra 3 tablets are becoming a dime a dozen and get straight to the meat: the new Acer Iconia Tab A700 is an NVIDIA-powered slate with a super-charged screen. Yes, this device is all about the display, and we’re talking 1920 x 1200 pixels on a 10.1-inch panel. And until ASUS’ Transformer Pad Infinity goes on sale next month, this is the only Android tab with that resolution you can get your hands on.
At the risk of spoiling our whole review, bright colors and a high resolution make navigating Acer’s branded build of Ice Cream Sandwich a treat, and its quad-core Tegra 3 insides make the tablet more than just a pretty face. But the WiFi-only Tab A700, retailing for $450, is not the only good ICS option around — and it’s not the most budget-friendly, either. Let’s take a closer look to see if its considerable advantages make it worth swiping that plastic.
This week we’ve gotten the opportunity to take an up close and personal peek at the Acer Iconia Tab A700, an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with a high definition display and the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor under the hood. This Acer device looks and feels rather similar to its predecessor, the Iconia Tab A500, but its components set it in a class all its own. This tablet has a 10.1-inch display with 1920 x 1200 pixels across it, this making it a 224ppi dense display-toting beast of a machine.
Hardware
While the display’s high definition resolution is obviously the real hero here, you’ll be glad to know that we’re now officially in an age where making a tablet that’s as thin and nice looking as the iPad isn’t so much of a hassle as it used to be. This version of the Iconia Tab is right around the same weight and shape as the A500, but here it’s got a bit more style.
The speckled back panel and the lovely detail in the glass panel up front as well as it’s surrounding plastic are all very well tuned. This tablet feels really nice to hold, as it were.
This tablet has several ports, each of them just about as far away from the others as they possibly could be. There’s a microHDMI, a microUSB, headphone jack, and a microSD card slot as well as a volume up/down button and a screen lock. The screen lock is a switch that holds your tablet in either landscape or portrait mode, and should you feel like heading down the road of the hacker, we’re sure you could find more than a few useful things to do with it in addition to its basic intent.
The power button sits at the top of the left of the device in the same place it did on the A500, and if one were to compare this tablet only to that older generation, one would applaud the efforts of Acer in pushing themselves to the next level. Compared to the iPad, you’ve got a surprisingly similar feeling machine, with just about the same weight and, at a distance at least, a really similar look.
Of course the power of any tablet doesn’t rest on its single specifications alone, and Apple’s iPad certainly relies on its software to beat the crowd. So how does Acer do with their new look at Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich?
Software
Inside this machine is Acer’s selection of applications including several pre-installed games, cloud-access apps, and music apps. Google’s collection of apps are here as well, this including Google Music (not often included right out of the box) as well as the common ICS additions like Google+.
The real heroes here are the additions made to Android 4.0 ICS by Acer. There’s a brand new lovely customizable lock-screen as well as a “Ring” that will allow you several new abilities including the screenshot, the ability to flip through web browser favorites in cards, and changing the volume on-screen. This Ring could very well be the reason you purchase this device – Acer has done a great job of pushing the limits of such a collection of functionalities for the discerning Android user.
You’ve also got the built-in ability to work with a printer to print whatever you’ve got on-screen to hard copy. We suggest to take a look at which devices will function with this connectivity, but from what we’ve seen, most modern wireless printers will indeed work. Acer has connected this device to the rest of its device suite with a simple registration app – this being a good example of why you’ll certainly want to be thinking about picking one Acer machine up if you’ve picked up the other as their device family continues to become more interconnected.
The NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor inside this beast will allow you connectivity with the NVIDIA TegraZone, a place where exclusive Tegra-only applications live, and you’ll find that they look quite fabulous. Have a peek at some benchmarks taken by this device to see how well you’ll be rolling:
Camera
This device’s camera is not all that different from the camera on the original A500, that also being a 5-megapixel shooter. You’ve got a 2-megapixel camera on the front as well, this as good as it was on the A500 as well for video chat. The back-facing camera does not have a flash and is able to auto-focus, but only after you’ve tapped the shutter button. Have a peek at a few pieces of media resulting from this setup:
Battery
This device is part of a new wave of battery-conscious devices that, with the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor with 4-PLUS-1 technology, is able to sleep so deeply that you’ve rarely got a situation where the device runs out of battery after having been left alone for an extended period. Instead where you’ll find battery drain is in the other normal places like mapping and streaming video. Even then you’ll have a fabulously long amount of play-time on your hands.
The Acer Iconia Tab A700′s battery will last you though several days at least if you use it intermittently, or it can last you as few as 8 hours if you’re rocking streaming video non-stop. Either way, it’s impressive.
Portfolio Case
We were also sent the new Acer Iconia Tab Series Portfolio Case – one of the strangest cases we’ve seen on the market thus far. It’s strange in that it relies on a high-powered adhesive to stick to the tablet rather than clamping on with plastic claws as any of a million other cases would. You put your tablet down on one side, pull back the adhesive covering on the other, and push that second side closed onto the back of your tablet.
The adhesive sticks as hard as you could possibly want it to, but is also somehow removable when you want as well. It’s certainly not something you’re going to be able to use multiple times, as the adhesive will certainly get weak after a couple of stickings, but this solution certainly is unique, that’s for sure. The case then also is made of some high-quality rubbery plastics with magnets inside to hold it closed and in stand mode. Interesting stuff!
Wrap-Up
This tablet will cost you $449.99 at any of a variety of outlets, this ringing in just at or below the rest of the market offering similar solutions. You’ve got the most advanced options in an Android tablet included here, and Acer’s unique vision for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will not leave you wanting for multi-tasking and for standing out in the software crowd. We recommend picking up the Iconia Tab A700 especially if you’ve already got Acer notebooks or towers in your home – their software connects quite fluidly and makes your whole personal cloud experience all the richer.
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Netbooks – do people still use them? I guess the answer would be “Yes”, although a resounding one it is not. The Acer TravelMate B113 is the latest netbook from the Taiwanese computer manufacturing company, where it will come along with an 11.6″ display alongside an Intel Celeron B877 processor – definitely not the fastest chip on the block by far, but it offers decent levels of performance for its product category. This particular netbook is also said to be a wee bit heavier compared to your regular netbook, but it will lack a DVD drive which some of us find essential. Unfortunately, you can strike the TravelMate B113 out of the Ultrabook list, as it fails to make the grade in terms of thickness.
