Difference Between Acer Iconia Tab A700 and Asus Transformer Prime TF700T

Sometimes vendors come up with slight variations of their previous products as a new design and market it with increased intensity. This might be because of several things. Sometimes it’s because they need to incorporate a cutting edge feature to an already popular and prudent device. Sometimes it’s because the vendor needs to avert the attention of consumers from a bad design by making a change to that and keeping the line intact. Sometimes, it’s to keep up with the tradition and continue the family by getting a new design to the market.

The devices we are going to compare today are of the kind we were talking about, although the reason behind the replications of products is yet to be analyzed. These two devices and their predecessors were state of the art devices and ranked at the top of the market. For this reason, we can eliminate the cause been averting the tracks of the predecessor which leaves us with two choices. In the course of this comparison, we will be able to deduce the reasoning behind the new release of these two handheld devices. The Acer Iconia Tab A700 and the Asus Transformer Prime TF700T will be our main actors today and let us look at them in detail.

Acer Iconia Tab A700

As they announced this tablet at CES 2012, Acer specifically mentioned that it won’t be a consumer tablet, rather a preview of a working prototype. So, if you don’t get to buy this on the market, don’t blame Acer. That been said, this counts to be one of the best tablets we have seen so far at CES 2012. Iconia A700 has 10.1 inches LCD capacitive touchscreen that features a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels at 224ppi pixel density. This is a super resolution even 20 inch monitors rarely score. To emphasize how great the resolution is, most of the typical laptops you find today only do up to 1366 x 768 pixels of resolution. In that context, you can understand that 1920 x 1200 pixels is a killer resolution. The screen is of high quality too which makes this ideal for entertainment.

The screen is just the cover for a beast that’s waiting to be burst. Acer Iconia A700 is powered by 1.3GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core processor and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. It is managed by Android OS v4.0 IceCreamSandwich, which will do justice to the hardware configuration. We are hoping that Acer has customized ICS to handle the quad core processor effectively, and we can only confirm it by running our benchmarking tests on it. But for the time being, we assume that they are smoothly running. It has three storage options 16 / 32 / 64GB and the ability to expand the storage using a microSD card, as well. A700 also has 5MP camera with autofocus, LED flash and geo tagging while it can capture 720p HD videos at 30 frames per second. It also has a front camera for the purpose of video conferencing. We are content about the HSDPA connectivity this tablet offers although LTE connectivity might have been the ideal option. It also has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n for continuous connectivity, and the ability to host a Wi-Fi hotspot is an ideal way to be generous with your internet connection.

On the usability perspective, Acer Iconia Tab A700 felt surprisingly light, and it’s not the thinnest tablet in the market, but the 9.8mm thickness isn’t discomfort to hold in your hand. Another special addition in Iconia Tab is the Acer Ring. It is a circular launcher menu you can directly use to access predefined apps from the lock screen. It is a nice enhancement to the stock ICS OS, and we are glad about the perspective it has given. It comes in Titanium Gray or Metallic Red and has somewhat thick screen outline, but it doesn’t cease to look expensive. We are told that the 9800mAh super battery can keep the device up and running for 10 long hours and that certainly is great.

Asus Transformer Prime TF700T

If you have seen us reviewing Asus Transformer Prime TF201, you would have known that we were impressed with Asus Transformer Prime. We are also impressed about the Prime TF700T, although not as much as we were for TF201. The key difference again starts with the screen. Asus Transformer Prime TF700T, which we would refer as Prime from now onwards, has 10.1 inches Super IPS LCD Capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels at 224ppi pixel density. Needless to say, we are even more impressed with this screen panel and the resolution it offers. The Super IPS LCD panel was just what we wanted in such a high resolution screen like this. It also has 1.3GHz Cortex A9 quad core processor on top of Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset. The graphics are being dominated by ULP GeForce GPU and it also has 1GB of DDR2 RAM that complements the configuration. As same as Acer Iconia A700, we are equally convinced that this setup would deliver robust and seamless performance on Android OS v4.0 IceCreamSandwich, and we’ll affirm the assumption after some rigorous testing when we get our hands on the device.

Prime comes in flavors of Amethyst Gray and Champagne Gold while having pleasing ergonomics. The dimensions are just comfortable at 263 x 180.8mm, and the thickness is one of the best in the market at 8.3mm. It inherits the expensive looks from Prime TF201 and keeps continuing to impress us. Having HSDPA connectivity, it isn’t one of those tablets that define its connectivity through wi-fi although Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n is available for continuous connectivity. The ability to act as a Wi-Fi hotspot makes the tablet ideal for sharing internet. It has 32 or 64GB of internal storage options while having the option to expand the storage using a microSD card.

Asus hasn’t forgotten the optics either for Transformer Prime features one of the best cameras in the tablet market. The 8MP camera has autofocus and LED flash with geo tagging, and the camcorder can capture 1080p videos at 30 frames per second. It also has 2MP camera for the video conferences. It seems to come with a modified UI featuring Asus Waveshare and we still need to get more hands on to comment on that. The battery information is still not available for us; however, knowing the 12 hour battery life of Transformer Prime TF201, we expect the battery life of TF700T to be somewhere along the line too.

Conclusion

We have come to the conclusion of a review on the difference between two best tablets in the current market. It’s unfortunate that Acer claims that they won’t be releasing it to the market, for it would have made an ideal competitor to Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime. They are both high end in terms of hardware featuring the best quad core processor and unmatchable Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset. They also feature the new Android OS v4.0 IceCreamSandwich, which is optimized for both smartphones and tablets and would be an ideal controller for the excess resources it has. The performance in graphics is also meant to be breathtaking, and especially the water effect we saw on TF201 is to be continued in this ultra-high resolution screen. The first emerging difference we would identify is the screen panel, in which, Asus Eee Pad excels. But that is not to underestimate the power of LCD panel in Iconia either, for they are almost alike. The next apparent difference is in optics, where Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF700T features 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos whereas Iconia A700 only enables you to capture 720p videos with the 5MP camera. That is about it for the differences, and despite those, we like them both, but Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF700T excels because of those reasons. As a footnote, we would like to mention that Acer Ring is rather a great addition in terms of productivity.