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It looks like owners of Acer's Iconia Tab A500 have something to be excited about today – according to various reports, an official update to Ice Cream Sandwich has begun rolling out. Users began reporting the update just this afternoon, indicating that Acer is pushing ICS to A500 owners a full two days ahead of the official start date.
You're probably getting used to OEMs being conveniently vague about dates of Ice Cream Sandwich rollouts. Well, Acer has seen fit to set the record straight and clue everyone into the update schedule for the Iconia Tab A100 and A500 Android tablets. Both devices will begin getting the update on April 27, which is a mere 10 days from now. The A200 got its update way back in February.
Acer tablet owners across the country were elated (well, most of them were, anyway) when Acer announced that Ice Cream Sandwich will be coming to the A100 and A500 in April. Thanks to a new leak that made its way to XDA, though, the wait for April just got a lot shorter. Ice Cream Sandwich ROMs for both devices landed in their respective forum on XDA earlier today, bringing a taste of Android 4.0 to the duo.
[Update: More Info] Acer America Announces Android 4.0 Update For A500 And A100, Coming In Mid-April
Over the weekend, Acer started pushing the Android 4.0 update to the Iconia Tab A200. Yesterday, Acer ANZ announced that the Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Iconia Tab A500 would be rolling out in April in Australia and New Zealand. Today, in an attempt to roll a turkey, Acer America followed suit and announced the ICS update for not only the A500, but the A100 along with it:
Acer ANZ just announced a distant April timeline for the Ice Cream Sandwich update to float all the way to Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us anything about the rest of the world, but unless they're delivering it by pigeon mail, I see it as a pretty good indicator of when it will hit the States, Europe, and other continents as well. Unfortunately,
Skype for Android, an app that gets almost as much love as it does hate, was updated to version 2.5 a few minutes ago. Because the last update unofficially opened up Skype to all 2.2+ devices, this time around Skype simply listed 13 more devices as whitelisted and approved for video chat capabilities:
If a refurb'd Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for $350 isn't your cup of tea, how about a brand-spankin'-new Acer Iconia Tab A500 for $320? If that sounds more like your speed, then Gettington is the place to be right now, and if you throw in the coupon code FREESHIP08 you'll nab your entire order sans-shipping.
We were all left with a bad taste in our mouths after hearing AT&T's pricing for the recently announced HTC Jetstream, but if you're looking for a solid Honeycomb tablet with always-connected mobile access then check out Ma Bell's latest offering: the Acer Iconia Tab A501.
The price of the Acer Iconia A500 has been steadily declining over the past few months and it looks like Target is offering their best deal yet for this Android 3.0 tablet. Starting from August 14th you can pick up the Iconia A500 for $399 and get a $100 Target Gift Card free, effectively making the price $299.
Over the past few weeks and months the price of the Acer Iconia A500 has been steadily dropping. It is now clear that it was to make way for the 4G version of the tablet from AT&T.
This is probably the best deal I've seen thus far on any Honeycomb tablet: starting this Sunday, July 17th, you'll be able to pick up the Acer Iconia Tab A500 from Target for $400 and get a $50 Target gift card to go along with it, effectively making the price $350. The Iconia A500 sports the standard specs that we've become accustomed to seeing out of Honeycomb tablets:
Update: This tablet is gracing the front page of eBay Daily Deals once again, but this time it's a bit more expensive ($5), which is still quite a good deal. Hit the updated source link below to buy.
We just got word that the Android 3.1 update is rolling out in the US for the Acer Iconia Tab A500. The update brings all kinds of Honeycomb goodies, like resizable widgets, performance enhancements, improved multitasking, USB host support, and more.
While Google released the Honeycomb update that brings resizable widgets, USB host support, and overall performance improvements to VZW XOOM owners during I/O, and Motorola dropped it on Wi-Fi only XOOMs late last week, all other Honeycomb tablet owners have been asking the same question: when do I get it?
The latest update to Flash 10.2 for Android (version number 10.2.157.51) hit the Market earlier today and introduced several enhancements, most notably hardware acceleration for 720p videos (mentioned here earlier), albeit only on Honeycomb tablets.
Good news, everyone! The Acer Iconia has been rooted and the process is so ridiculously simple that it's almost offensive. Seriously. Here is the entire step-by-step process to gaining full root on the Acer Iconia:
Earlier this month we told you that the Acer Iconia A500 would be hitting the Best Buy sales floor on April 24th for $450 and, well, it has. If you need a refresher on the tablet's specs, here you go:
There has been a lot of confusion regarding this post on NVIDIA's Tegra developer forum that was misconstrued as vaguely implying NVIDIA would stop supporting the "Harmony" generation of Tegra devices going forward (ViewSonic gTablet, Notion Ink Adam, ViewSonic ViewPad 7, Advent Vega, and others) and would instead only stick to the "Ventana" generation. Rather than panicking and freaking out, we pinged our contact at NVIDIA to get a straight answer and held off until we heard the official response.
Just last week we reported the first reasonably priced Android tablet, the Asus EEE Pad Transformer, and it already looks like the competition is going to get thick where pricing is concerned. Acer has officially announced its Iconia A500 tablet, which will be hitting the Best Buy sales floor on April 24th for a cool $449. This brings it in at $50 above the rumored price of the Transformer, but still $150 less than the almost-equally-spec'd Motorola XOOM.
Update: The 10.1-inch big brother of the A100, the A500, is also available for pre-order and ships on April 20, though it will cost you the substantially larger sum of £449. Why? It's packing an LED-backlit display (as opposed to LCD), 32GB of HDD space, and 1GB of RAM.