Tablet Android

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Performance and battery life

We’re getting quite used to seeing Tegra 3 tablets that serve up Ice Cream Sandwich with smooth, fast performance, and the A700 belongs to this breed, thanks to that NVIDIA CPU clocked at 1.3GHz and 1GB of RAM. That’s not to say it’s at the top of it’s class: next to other quad-core Tegra 3 tablets such as the Iconia Tab A510 and ASUS’ TF700, this slate seems a bit humble, but its scores at least dwarf those of dual-core slates like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1.

	Acer Iconia Tab A700	ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity TF700	ASUS Transformer Pad TF300	Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1	Toshiba Excite 10
Quadrant	3,311	4,685	3,695	2,602	4,016
Linpack singled-thread	43.3	N/A	41.7	35.6	45.8
Linpack multi-thread	94	N/A	89.83	61.3	121.9
NenaMark 1 (fps)	60.8	N/A	60.3	29.5	85.4
NenaMark 2 (fps)	37.9	N/A	46.9	19.0	47.8
Vellamo	1,283	1,475	1,320	Would not run	1,471
AnTuTu	10,499	12,027	N/A	N/A	N/A
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms)	1,970	2,012	2,120	2,222	N/A
GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps)	59	75	N/A	N/A	N/A
CF-Bench	11,567	7,874	N/A	N/A	N/A
SunSpider: lower scores are better

We already mentioned how the A700 often required us to repeat taps before successfully launching apps, and we found the performance to be choppy in other ways, too. Apps like Skype crashed randomly on occasion, and every time we fired up Real Racing 2 the screen froze for at least five seconds before letting us start gaming. Still, many of tablets we’ve tested recently have been plagued by a little bugginess, and Acer’s new slate isn’t any worse in this regard.

	Battery Life
Acer Iconia Tab A700	8:22
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7	12:01
Apple iPad 2	10:26
Acer Iconia Tab A510	10:23
ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime	10:17 / 16:34 (keyboard dock)
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1	9:55
Apple iPad (2012)	9:52 (HSPA) / 9:37 (LTE)
Apple iPad	9:33
ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity TF700	9:25
Motorola Xoom 2	8:57
HP TouchPad	8:33
ASUS Transformer Pad TF300	8:29 / 12:04 (keyboard dock)
Acer Iconia Tab A200	8:16
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus	8:09
Amazon Kindle Fire	7:42
Galaxy Tab 2 7.0	7:38
Acer Iconia Tab A500	6:55

The Iconia Tab A700′s 36.25Wh battery lasted eight hours and 22 minutes on our battery rundown test, which involves running a standard-definition video on loop with the screen brightness at 50 percent and WiFi on. That falls significantly short of Acer’s claim of 11 hours for video playback via WiFi (it also rates the A700 for 13 hours of video playback sans WiFi). It also falls about an hour short of the Infinity TF700 and the iPad 2012, two of the A700′s closest competitors when it comes to display quality. In short, though you won’t be reaching for a charger come midday, that runtime is frankly pretty uninspiring.