Leader Impression I7A

The Leader Impression I7A ($179 list) is a budget-friendly way to enjoy a taste of Google's latest "Ice Cream Sandwich," Android OS 4.0. This tablet is for geeks only, as it's laggy and somewhat unstable, and doesn't support the Google Play app market. But with a sub-$200 price tag, a decent display, and a surprisingly solid metal enclosure, Android geeks may be willing to put up with its stability and performance issues.

Design and Features
The resemblance between the I7A and the original Apple iPad is uncanny, with both featuring brushed metal backs with flattened edges—only the I7A is shrunken down to 7 inches. At 6.73 by 5.19 by 0.45 inches (HWD) and 9.44 ounces, the I7A is comfortable to hold, but a bit odd-shaped compared with most 7-inchers. The Amazon Kindle Fire ($199, 4 stars) is taller and narrower at 7.5 by 4.7 by .45 inches (HWD), and heavier at 14.6 ounces. Despite using the same 16:9 screen aspect ratio as the Kindle Fire (Best Deal: $199.00 at Amazon), the I7A's body has more of a 4:3 ratio, mimicking the iPad. A hard reset pin hole, micro USB port, mini HDMI port, microSD card slot, and Volume buttons all sit along the top edge. I was easily able to mirror 1080p video onto a large HDTV using an HDMI cable—a nice touch for a budget tablet. The Power button can be found on the left edge, while a Back button can be found on the right. Along the bottom edge is the 3.5mm headphone jack and power port, for charging with the included AC adapter (you can also charge using the included micro USB cable.)

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Leader Impression I7A : Horizontal
Leader Impression I7A : Back
Leader Impression I7A : With Case
Leader Impression I7A : Angle

The I7A uses a 7-inch TFT LCD with 1,024-by-600-pixel resolution, the same resolution found on the Kindle Fire. The screen itself gets relatively bright, with a wide viewing angle and pleasantly saturated colors. Details are generally sharp, though text has a fuzziness to it that strained my eyes after extended use. There is also some uneven lighting around the edges of the screen. The screen is on par with the one found on the Kobo Vox ($199, 2 stars), though the I7A has a wider viewing angle.

This is a Wi-Fi only tablet that connects to 802.11b/g/n networks, but only on the 2.4GHz band. Leader advertises Bluetooth, but I couldn't find any way to connect to devices. A 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera works with Skype calls, but there is no rear-facing camera. Also included in the box is a protective folio case, which feels a bit cheap, but is useful for propping up the I7A on desks.

Hardware, Performance, and OS
The metal chassis gives the I7A a premium feel, but underneath the hood are far more pedestrian components. The I7A is powered by a single-core 1GHz VIMICRO Cortex-A8 processor and 512MB RAM with 4GB of internal storage. Only 2.56GB are available for user data, but storage can be expanded by up to 32GB with a microSD card.

Given the low-end specs, it was no surprise that the I7A's performance struggles. Home screen animations appeared smooth, but touch input itself is often jerky, scrolling is rarely smooth, and precise movements are limited by what seem like click-stop intervals built into the screen. In a game like Angry Birds, instead of having complete control of infinitely variable shooting angles, finger swipes move the aim up or down at small, but noticeably set intervals. Web pages load a bit slowly and app crashes were fairly common. Switching between video playback and other apps often caused some hang-ups. It's not as bad as the Kobo Vox (Best Deal: $59.98 at Walmart.com), but nowhere near as smooth and hiccup-free as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) ($249, 4 stars), which also runs ICS.

While more and more tablets are getting the "Ice Cream Sandwich" treatment, it was still a pleasant surprise to find Google's latest OS running on such an inexpensive tablet. The I7A uses a stock build without heavy skinning, but it lacks Google apps, including the Google Play app market. Instead, the I7A comes with the GetJar app market, which offers a mediocre selection of third-party apps. Some popular apps like Angry Birds and Dolphin HD browser are here, but the selection is a far cry from the Google Play market. I was able to use the Amazon Appstore to download and install apps like Deer Hunter Reloaded. Leader did include an APK installer for side loading apps, but this isn't exactly a user friendly solution. While the I7A is free of bloatware, some of the pre-loaded apps, like the Kobo reader app, do not work at all.

Video playback is smooth, and the I7A can handle MPEG4, H.264, Xvid, and DivX videos at up to 1080p resolution. In our battery test, which loops a video with brightness set to max and Wi-Fi turned on, the I7A lasted only 3 hours, 15 minutes—a good deal shorter than the Kindle Fire's 4 hours, 55 minutes in the same test.

The Leader Impression I7A offers an interesting combination of solid build quality, moderate performance, and the latest Android OS at one of the lowest prices we've seen yet. But it's outside the standard Google realm, which limits its appeal to folks who know what they're doing with Android tablets, and its imprecise touch input and stability issues keep us from recommending it to average consumers.

Tablet buyers on a budget should spend just $20 more for a more stable Kindle Fire, though that doesn't run ICS. On the other hand, it's entirely possible to hack ICS onto the Fire, and if you're shopping for an edgy tablet like the Leader Impression, you very well might be the kind of person with the skills to do so. If you demand a classy Android 4.0 experience out of the box, pony up for the $249 Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0), which strikes a great balance between performance, features, and price.

Acer Iconia Tab A510

Acer's new Android tablet, the Iconia Tab A510 ($449.99 list), doesn't give you quite enough for your money. The tablet market is insanely competitive: You have to deliver on style, price, or apps to succeed. While the A510 (Best Deal: $449.99 at Amazon) is a decent Android 4.0 tablet with the latest quad-core processor, it's beaten by its competitors in nearly every measure.

Physical Design
If you're used to the sleek metallic edges of the latest Asus or Toshiba tablets, the A500 will be a bit of a disappointment. At 6.9 by 10.2 by .4 inches (HWD) and 23.5 ounces, it's slightly thicker and heavier than its top competitors. For instance, the Asus Transformer TF300 ($399, 4 stars) is just a little slimmer at .38 inches and lighter at 22.2 ounces, and the Asus Transformer Prime ($499, 4 stars) is slimmer and lighter still.

But it's not the size that's the issue here. Acer uses a lot of plastic and not much metal in the black-and-silver case, leading to a slightly chintzy feel. The mildly textured plastic back is practical, but doesn't feel premium, even when compared to other plastic tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) ($249, 4 stars).

The A510's odd-looking MicroUSB jack comes with an adapter that turns it into a full-sized USB port. The tablet supports external USB keyboards and storage, as long as that storage is formatted as FAT32. That's pretty hot; it means you can play videos off an external hard drive on this tablet. Asus and Toshiba tablets have that feature too. There's also a built-in mic on top, a rotation lock, and dual speakers on the bottom.

Turn on the Iconia 510 and you get a workaday 1280-by-800-pixel LCD panel, which is absolutely standard on midrange 10-inch tablets. That's on par with the latest models from Asus, Samsung, and Toshiba, although many tablet watchers are holding out for the upcoming 1920-by-1200 models, which will compete more closely with the new Apple iPad's ($499, 4.5 stars) 2048-by-1536-pixel screen.

Acer touts its 9800mAh / 36.26W battery as a cure for battery-life blues, and we got strong performance with it: 9 hours, 34 minutes of continuous video playback with Wi-Fi on and brightness turned to max. That beat out the 7 hours, 53 minutes we got on the Asus TF300 (Best Deal: $399.99 at P.C. Richard & Son), not to mention the five and a half hours the new iPad achieved.

Android and Apps
The A510 runs Android 4.0.3 with a light skin, Acer's Ring UI. Take a look at our full review of Android 4.0 (4 stars), Ice Cream Sandwich, for more details on the basic OS here.

Pressing a virtual button at the bottom of the screen pops up five quick app shortcuts, a carousel of Web bookmarks, and a volume control. The tablet also comes with a few custom widgets and apps. Acer Print lets you print documents or Web pages to a wide variety of Wi-Fi-enabled printers. Aupeo is a custom radio app. McAfee does antivirus duty, Polaris Office reads Microsoft Office documents, and clear.fi is a DLNA media server.

Benchmarks came out looking great, as they generally do on tablets with Nvidia's blazing Tegra 3 processor. Running here at 1.3GHz, the A510 scored faster than the 1.2GHz Asus Transformer Pad TF300T and roughly on par with the original Transformer Prime (Best Deal: $499.99 at P.C. Richard & Son), which also had a 1.3GHz quad-core processor.

But I encountered strange performance slowdowns when testing the A510. Sometimes on-screen buttons weren't responsive; I found this both on the built-in keyboard and in Zen Pinball. Sometimes screens took an extra moment to render. These issues didn't occur all the time, but they happened often enough to annoy (and to lose some pinball games).

10-inch Android tablets still have a problem with finding good apps in Google Play. As most apps are designed for small phone screens, many prominent apps look pretty awful on large Android tablets. The A510 offers two options to help with this problem: You can download either Tablified Market ($1.49, 4 stars), with a list of 1,500 or so top-notch tablet apps, or Nvidia's Tegra Zone, with a few dozen high-quality games designed for Tegra-powered tablets. Those outlets improve the situation, but app availability still falls far short of the Apple iPad, which has over 200,000 third-party apps with UIs designed specifically for tablets. The A510 connects to the Internet using Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n (albeit only on 2.4GHz, not 5GHz). It had no trouble connecting to our WPA2-protected networks. It also supports Bluetooth 2.1. And there's a blocked-off SIM card slot behind a door on the side, a sloppy touch—either eliminate the slot or make it active.

Multimedia and Conclusions
The A510 has 32GB of built-in storage as well as a microSD card slot that supports 32GB cards, hidden behind a door on the side. It plays all the usual audio and video formats, including MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG, WAV, WMV, H.264, MP4, DivX and Xvid (in AVI containers). Video files up to 1080p resolution looked sharp and clear. Oddly, though, the built-in micro HDMI port only put out 720p resolution to our TV.

The tablet has a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 1-megapixel front camera. Indoor shots taken with the rear camera looked noisy, with a decidedly purple cast. Not great.  Low-light photos showed some blur from low shutter speeds. Outdoors, images were sharper, but still with that purplish color imbalance. The front camera's 1-megapixel still images actually had better colors.

The tablet records 1080p video at 30 frames per second outdoors, but indoors that drops to a jittery 16 frames per second. 720p videos indoors clock in at 20 frames per second. As I know the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor can handle 1080p at 30 frames per second without breaking a sweat, this is probably just a cut-rate camera module.

If the Iconia Tab A510 cost $50 less, it would have a different rating. Priced at $450, this tablet sits in an uncomfortable middle ground. It certainly has some things going for it, most notably its long battery life and powerful speakers.

Unfortunately for the A510, you can get more capable tablets for less. The Asus TF300T, at $399 for a similar 32GB model, gives you 95 percent of the A510's speed, along with a better camera and slimmer form factor, for less money. The Apple iPad 2, currently running $399, is another prime competitor—it isn't as fast as the Iconia 510, but it has far, far more tablet-optimized apps. I'd also keep an eye out for Toshiba's upcoming tablet line, which we did a recent hands-on with. It promises Tegra 3 power and Android 4.0 with USB host mode in a sleeker body.