Acer unveils $450 Iconia Tab A700: 1920 x 1200 display and Tegra 3 under the hood
With new laptop announcements coming practically every other day as of late, a tablet unveiling is a nice change of pace. We have Acer to thank for that, as it's lifting the curtain on the 10-inch Iconia Tab A700.
Context & Ripple Effects
The $450 Iconia Tab A700 is Acer's second Tegra 3 slate of the year, arriving three months after the company put its first quad-core Android tablet, the Iconia Tab A510, up for pre-order at $449.99. The move continues the cadence Acer set when it entered the category with its first 7-inch and 10.1-inch Android tablets announced in November 2010 and followed through with the first 7-inch Honeycomb tablet, the A100, in August 2011.
What distinguishes the A700 is the panel: a 1920 x 1200 display at a price point where rivals were still shipping lower-resolution screens. The announcement also landed amid unconfirmed reports, circulating since early June 2012, that Acer planned Windows 8 tablets alongside Toshiba and Asustek to challenge Apple's iPad — so this is an Android play landing just before Acer's platform strategy was expected to widen. The story drew pickup from The Verge, GigaOM, Mashable and several Android-focused outlets, indicating broad interest in whether a full-HD-class screen could be had at mid-range pricing.
First-order effects
- Acer now fields two $449–$450 Tegra 3 tablets, with the A700 effectively superseding the March A510 on the strength of its 1920 x 1200 panel — buyers at that price point get a materially sharper screen without paying more.
- Nvidia gains another marquee design win for Tegra 3, this time demonstrating the chip driving a high-resolution 10-inch display rather than a standard-panel one.
Second-order effects
- Competing Android tablet vendors are pushed to match the high-resolution-plus-$450 combination or cede the spec-sheet comparison at the most contested price band below the iPad.
- Panel and silicon suppliers able to pair dense displays with quad-core SoCs gain leverage, as display quality becomes the differentiator once processor parity across Android slates is reached.
Third-order effects
- If high-resolution panels keep filtering into mid-priced hardware, the premium display tier that justified flagship tablet pricing erodes, compressing margins for vendors competing on components alone.
- With rumors pointing Acer toward Windows 8 tablets as well, the vendor's tablet line looks set to span two operating systems, testing whether component-driven Android pricing can coexist with a Microsoft-licensed portfolio.
The trend: Tablet displays are racing ahead of prices, with 1920 x 1200 panels arriving at the $450 mark and turning screen resolution into the new battleground beneath Apple's premium tier.