The 10-inch tablet is based on a quad-core CPU and costs €249/$249

Sep 2, 2013 11:55 GMT  ·  By

You'd think that a tablet priced at €249/$249 wouldn't be anything special, especially when it's supposed to be a 10.1-inch model, but Acer has taken great pains to disavow everyone of that notion.

It might have something to do with Acer's financial predicament. The company isn't in trouble, exactly, but its sales of laptops and tablets haven't been stellar either.

Thus, the price it gave the Iconia A3 tablet might, in fact, be lower than it would like, yet a necessary sacrifice.

After all, it needs some way to deal with the competition provided by the likes of Samsung Galaxy Note 12.2, LG G Pad 8.3 and the new Transformer Pad prepared by ASUS.

Anyway, the new tablet Iconia A3 is a mid-range slate apparently priced at the same level as low-end tablets.

It is based on a quad-core Cortex A7 processor with a frequency of 1.2 GHz. Possibly a MediaTek chip.

1 GB of Ram backs the chip up, while NAND Flash chips add 16 GB of on-board storage space to the equation.

Moving on, the Iconia A3 also comes with 5.1-channel surround sound on headphones, thanks to the inbuilt Dolby Digital Plus chip.

Then, there's the microSD card slot, which lets buyers expand the storage space by another 16 GB or 32 GB. It depends on how much money they can spare for a card.

Other hardware components include a 5-megapixel camera (can shoot 1080p Full HD video), Wi-Fi and a battery that can last for 9 hours of video playback.

As for the 10.1-inch LCD, it is an IPS screen (in-plane switching) with a native resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels.

Acer ships Iconia A3, or will ship it in October, with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean OS and IntelliSpina feature that rotates the screen according to orientation, even when lying flat. A 3G version will be launched in November, for €299/$299.