Acer Iconia A500 tablet sports Android 3.0 Honeycomb

Acer's Iconia A500 Android tablet features a 10.1-inch screen, Android 3.0 HoneyComb, HDMI output, 5 megapixel camera...and a $449.99 price tag.
Computer maker Acer is launching its first Android tablet, the 10.1-inch Acer Iconia A500—and it’s aiming to appeal to consumers with a gaming- and entertainment-friendly design and a starting price tag lower than Apple’s now-iconic iPad: just $449.99 at Best Buy.

“Staying connected and entertained are firmly embedded as a part of our everyday lives—and the Acer Iconia Tab A500 does this and so much more in a performance-minded, sleek, and stylish design,” said Acer America’s VP of product marketing Sumit Agnihotry, in a statement. vice president of product marketing, Acer America.
Acer is positioning that A500 as a slim, lightweight tablet designed for entertainment and gaming—and it runs Google’s tablet-optimized Android 3.0 Honeycomb, offering more than just a smartphone scaled up to a tablet size. Powered by a 1 GHz Nvidia Tegra 250 processor, the Iconia A500 features a 10.1-inch touch display with a 1,280 by 800-pixel resolution so users can enjoy high-definition gaming and video entertainment—and an integrated HDMI output enables users to push high-def content to a nearby big screen. And it won’t weigh people down: the A500 comes in at just under 1.7 pounds, and measures just over a half inch thick.
The A500 sports forward- and rear-facing cameras (2 megapixel and 5 megapixels, respectively), so the tablet can be used to shoot high quality images and video and do high-def video chat. The A500 also sports 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth wireless networking, and an integrated GPS receiver. The A500 also sports two 3260 mAh Li-polymer batteries that Acer says can power up to eight hours of video playback and ten hours of Wi-Fi Web surfing. If there’s one place where the A500 skimps for some users, it might be storage: the A500 comes with 16 MB of flash storage, although a microSD card reader offers expandable removable storage. Acer says the tablet platform supports up to 32 MB of flash storage, so expect to see more capacity in future models. The A500 also supports Acer’s clear.fi media sharing for connecting to DLNA-compliant media devices.
To emphasize entertainment capabilities, the Iconia A500 ships with two HD arcade games:Need for Speed: Shift andLet’s Golf. The A500 will happily run Adobe Flash content, although—in an interesting move—users will need to install Flash themselves.

Online pre-orders for the A500 start April 8 exclusively at Best Buy in North America, with in-store pre-orders starting April 14. Customers should be able to set hands on the Iconia A500 in stores starting April 24. The A500 will carry a suggested price of $449.99, $50 less than Apple’s least-expensive iPad 2. Acer is also selling a selection of optional peripherals, including a $69.99 full-sized keyboard, a $79.99 dock with IR remote and external speaker jacks, and a $39.99 protective case that doubles as a stand. Acer is also offering an international power adapter taht can handle the UK and Europe as well as Central and South America for $29.99.
The Iconia A500 has some strong points going for it: a high-definition screen, HDMI output, Android 3.0 Honeycomb, and a lightweight design—and, perhaps more importantly, a price lower than Apple’s entry-level iPad. However, it lacks a 3G mobile broadband option, is comparatively light on storage, and so far Android 3.0 tablets have failed to light a fire under consumers, while Apple’s iPad 2 continues to be in short supply at retailers.
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HTC reports record sales and strong demand for ThunderBolt, Android

HTC has beaten all estimates and posted record profits and revenue for the first quarter of 2011, doubling sales last year. Sales of the ThunderBolt and other Android handsets has been high.

A couple days ago HTC raced past Nokia to become the world’s third-largest phone maker by market value. Today, the smartphone company revealed that sales in the first quarter (three months) of 2011 were double that of a year ago, helping HTC beat estimates for revenue and profit, two things that have investors jumping for joy. Bloomberg notes that strong demand for its Android devices, especially the ThunderBolt 4G, propelled sales.
HTC beat profit estimates, posting NT$14.8 billion ($513 million) in profit, about three times its profit last year. It shipped an estimated 8.5-9.0 million handsets for the quarter. Revenue hit NT104.2 billion, beating HTC’s January forecast of NT$94 billion and analyst’s estimates of NT$95 billion.
While hard sales numbers haven’t been released, BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk surveyed 150 Verizon Wireless stores in late March and found that the ThunderBolt had outsold the iPhone in 28 percent of stores and equaled iPhone sales in 61 percent of them.
“Several respondents indicated that the store lines were longer for the first day of the ThunderBolt launch than they were for the iPhone,” Piecyk wrote. “Verizon sales people indicated that sales of the iPhone were still strong but they simply noted that the ThunderBolt was as strong if not stronger.”
Do you own a ThunderBolt phone on Verizon? If so, how is your service and battery life? Was it hard to find the handset?
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Android to lead smartphone market through 2015, says IDC

The analysts at IDC say Android will not only become the most widely-used mobile operating system in the world, but it will increase its lead through 2015.
Market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) announced today a study which predicts significant increases in the smartphone market in 2011, and foresees Google’s Android mobile operating system leading the smarphone pack through 2015.
According to IDC’s forecast, the number of smartphones used by consumers will balloon by 49.2 percent this year as mobile phone users ditch their “dumb” cell phones for more advanced ones in the coming months. This equates to roughly 450 million smartphones — about 147 million more than were purchased in 2010. Despite these high numbers, the smartphone growth rate is expected to be slightly slowed compared to last year.
“Overall market growth in 2010 was exceptional,” says Kevin Restivo, an IDC researcher. “Last year’s high market growth was due in part to pent-up demand from a challenging 2009, when many buyers held off on mobile phone purchases. The expected market growth for 2011, while still notable, will taper off somewhat from what we saw in 2010.”
Devices running the Android OS, which come from a wide variety of manufacturers, are expected to dominate the market in 2011 with 39.5 percent market share. IDC predicts that number will only increase as time goes on, with Android enjoying 45.4 percent of the market by 2015.
Apple’s share of the market, with its iOS devices, is expected to sit at 15.7 percent, and will decline slight, to 15.3 percent, by 2015, IDC projects. The number of users sporting BlackBerry handsets is also expected to fall from 14.9 percent this year to 13.7 by 2015.
Due to Nokia’s shift from its Symbian OS to Windows Phone 7 and Windows Mobile, those operating systems will become far more widely used, expanding from this year’s projected 5.5 percent market share to 20.9 percent share by 2015. That would make Windows Phone OS the number 2 mobile OS in the world, after Android.

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