I dunnooooo.... my family and I haven't had particularly positive experiences with the quality of Acer devices in the past. I think I'd even rather wait for SAMSUNG's next entry before I'd buy Acer's.

I'm with you. As a prudent consumer, I have to wait a bit before purchasing the Tab knowing that other tablets will be announced mere months afterwards. The Tegra 2 is *just* around the corner for many of these tablets, which may offer a tremendous performance benefit in certain situations. A wait-and-see is in the cards.

I'm still leaning toward the Tab, though, and it would take a LOT to displace it. I'm not terribly concerned about Honeycomb, as the Tab will get community ROMs and as such will have a very long life span. Also with GPU accelerated browsing around the corner (and hopefully UI), I suspect that the performance benefit for T20 devices will be unnoticeable for most tasks -- however, the T20 would allow for one HECK of a ubuntu terminal running at nearly netbook speeds and this *is* compelling to me.

If the release dates of these other devices are anything but January of next year, and if they compromise on any of the areas where the Tab offers quality, then I'm getting the Tab. Period. But a wait-and-see is at least prudent.

I'm not sure that Android splitting between Tablet and Phone OS is a good idea. I would rather see a unified OS with a smart UI that could run well on devices of different sizes. This 'split' will cause a fissure in the marketplace for apps going forward, and will require that developers target Phones or Tablets specifically as they will have different APIs (ie. the different OSs).

I don't see splitting versions is a being an elegant solution for the two device classes. A crafty, and talented UI developer could easily concoct a solution for automatically re-arranging apps based on their display resolution. Supporting multiple styles also leads to multi-pane displays, etc. Other than resolution, these devices offer much the same in the way of processor and memory.

If anything, modularize the UI and split that between devices. Supporting two OSs seems like a waste of resources when there is so much overlap.

Lastly, setting a minimum spec other than resolution, will result in heavier apps, but not necessarily better apps. That apps have to take into account slower devices, Android apps are generally well optimized for constrained environments. Having higher minimum specs will make developers lazy and use more resources to create less -- a statement that has TONS of historical precedent; are 2.4GHz dual-core CPUs with 4GB RAM really necessary for word processing, managing files, and web surfing? Clearly not, as we do all of these things on our phones. The only argument that I can see for setting performance spec is games. But this too can be handled in *many* different ways.

I have an Acer netbook, and the atheros WiFi card was faulty out of the box. It kept dropping connections. I picked up an replacement card on ebay, cracked the netbook open and replaced it, and it's been running well ever since.

I too am weary about acer products, but if they pass initial reviews without any glaring quality flaws, I'm confident that they will run well for quite a while.

But if their LCD screens are any indication of what we'll see on a tablet, then I'll pass

Ha ha. My only experience with Acer has been with a laptop. Works fine but has absolutely the worst keyboard in the world. My speed on it is like half my speed on other keyboards. You have to press so hard for a key press to register. So given that they are the only company I have ever come across to mess up something as basic as a laptop keyboard I am not sure how much they can be relied on to produce a touch screen without issues.

Now an ASUS tablet is something that I might covet. In my experience, Asus products are both good looking and solidly built. Unfortunately their screens have to be the worst in the industry! I'm not sure where they are getting their LCD panels, but they're ****ing terrible!

Here's a very cool (IMO) typographic clock widget and weather widget, that would play very well with a variety of wallpapers.


http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=818896

I wonder what launcher is being run at the bottom? I like the plain text look as it's small an unobtrusive. Is this ADW or launcher pro?

Remember the 3D ADW from a prior post? Well, one of the reasons that people love ADW is the extreme customizability. Here's a theme that's very, very cool, that shows this off:


http://themes.piratemedia.tv/2010-07...tem-adw-theme/

The problem with ADW has been performance, but the latest GPU accelerated version seems to solve that. So you get a very slick UI with outstanding performance win-win-win.

Here's a few more themes to show how cool ADW can be.

This would drive mac heads wild:


The Sense launcher experience:


Minimalist and quite stunning (my fav):


With 3D these themes would be simply STUNNING, and play very well on the Tabs capacious screen!

HOT

This is a REALLY cool app called Itching Thumb! It basically adds a palm-pre like multitasking 'card' like system to the device. Check it out!
http://www.xda-developers.com/androi...sk-in-android/

It also adds 3D effects to the cards which add a nice bit of visual flare.



There are videos below!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s92BLUj6r0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s92BLUj6r0

This will work VERY well with the Tab (assuming it works well with the 1024x600 res). I can't wait to show this off!

Haha no wonder Steve Jobs is scared.

You have got to respect the customizability of Android! Suddenly the Pre or the Playbook don't look so hot as Android can basically mimick their UI features with a much richer app repository and a far larger selection of devices. Very, very, nice.