We’ve covered the Acer Iconia A100 a few times across the site, in fact our very own Randy Arrowood is running a challenge of sorts to use his tab exclusively for the next 30 Days, you can check out how he got on his first week here. There’s no denying that the A100 is an attractive and cost effective tablet choice since it’s release at the tail-end of new year. It was one of the only 7″ tabs to have dual-core on-board and even shipped with Tegra 2, also featuring a micro-SD Card slot, stereo speakers, docking port and mini-HDMI. Of course, the A100 became a more attractive lower-priced tab with the announcements that it, along with it’s older brother the A500, will be getting treated to a helping of Ice Cream Sandwich
As an owner of the A100 for quite some time, I have to admit that it’s not all roses, the battery life could be better, but it’s certainly not dire. The main gripe people (myself included) have had is that she comes with a locked bootloader and Acer haven’t listened to the community’s plea for an unlock solution, something that ASUS and HTC (even unlocking the Grandfather G1) seem more than capable of.
As always though, the community devs we all know and love found a way to get round all of this, and now development is really starting to kick off. You may have heard that some ICS updates were leaked on XDA a while back, with this came a new bootloader and not long after an unlocked bootloader from forum member ZeroNull, the very same who bought us full root on ICS. Along with an official ClockworkMod Recovery being prepared by ptesmoke and a number of others the A100 is shaping up to become an even stronger 7-incher.
There are a few ROMs out there that you can find in the usual spot ranging from ports of A500 ROMS to an official release of Flexreaper. All this shows signs of promise for development in this area however, the icing on the cake and the coming of age for many devices is soon to come in the form of a CM9 build for the A100 and it’s brothers in the form of the Iconia ICS Project. We’ll be sure to bring you more when the preview builds roll in. I, for one, can’t wait to see some CM love on my tab.