An Ace(r) Christmas Present

Recent attempts to blog from the netbook have taken hours. I wish that was an exaggeration. My last post took 1 hour and 40 mins to edit five photos. I spend inordinate amounts of time wailing "Don't 'unresponsive script' me, you stupid machine. Arghhhh, just work!"

It does my head in but when I'm off work it's my only option. I always blog before or after work or on my lunchbreaks but now I'm home I'm limited to the crappy netbook or the iPad. Shouldn't moan really, should I? I'm a big Apple fan but even their most diehard supporter will admit to the flaws. You're locked into their systems, it's hard to import files from elsewhere and unless you have the most up to date devices, this causes a big old problem when it comes to photos. My iPhone is a 3GS which is almost four years old now and the camera is RUBBISH. My iPad is amazing and I love it for games and social media and general browsing but the camera is also pants. That makes life really difficult when it comes to blogging. I don't think it's worth upgrading the netbook to a laptop (they feel massive now!) but I've been looking at tablet reviews for a while.

The timing couldn't have been more perfect for an early Christmas present to arrive.





Acer sent me an Iconia tablet to review and here it is!



As an Apple girl I've never actually tried an Android device before and I'm rather impressed. Still need to sit down with the manual and work out all the little bits and bobs that aren't in quite the same place as on my iPad but it's all incredibly simple to set up and start using. Nothing has baffled me so far!


Spot the blog...



One huge plus for me is that you can plug stuff into it. On this tablet there's space for a HDMI cable and a micro SD card slot. I have 4 normal SD cards for my camera but no micro ones (d'oh!) so haven't been able to test that out quite yet but one of these clever gadgets is currently winging its way across the Atlantic to me. It's rather hard to track down but I'm pleased I found it, especially as it's cheap and has free postage. Once it's here the Iconia will be the perfect blogging device.

Negatives? Well, it kinda depends on how happy you are with Google interference in your life - it wants to auto default to a lot of things that I'd rather not sign up to. You just don't hit the OK button for them. I find it a bit less intuitive to use than my iPad but that may just be conditioning. The touch screen is definitely a bit less sensitive (especially the space bar for some reason) but it's still decent.

Overall, I think it's great. It feels nice to use, it looks well made and it's very reasonably priced for what it is. It's not an iPad and you're not paying that premium for the Apple design but you're getting a very nifty little tablet for your money. Definitely worth adding to your Christmas list.


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Acer sent me the tablet for review purposes. All opinions are my own.