Gadgetory

I cracked open the Acer Iconia Tab a 500 last August and I gave it high marks for having an easy to open case replaceable battery and a decent internal hardware layout but I disliked acer's overuse of what appeared to be kept on tape and the fact that the LCD and front panel were difficult if not impossible to separate now eight months later Acer is back with an updated model the Iconia Tab a 5-10 how will it compare let's open it up and find out I'm Bill Detweiler and this is cracking open unfortunately removing the a 510 s outer shell is a bit more difficult than removing the a 500 s first you'll need to pop off the thin plastic strips that run along the tablets sides and then remove the screws hidden underneath then using a thin tool release the catches that hold the case to the front panel assembly once you've gone all the way around the case you can lift the front panel up and out but not completely off you'll need to disconnect the front panel from a small circuit board that's connected to the external microphone and microUSB port with the front panel assembly in case separated we get our first look at the a 510 s internal hardware and a few things jump right out both good bad and interesting first the good the a 510 has a big battery at 9800 milliamp hours it has more capacity than the battery on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 but less than a 2012 iPads power unit according to CNN's tests the a 5 tens battery delivered over 11 hours of video playback which at this point meets every other tablet except you guessed it the iPad I also liked that much of the internal hardware such as the speaker's battery cameras and motherboard are separate components this means you can replace each part individually so what don't I like about the a5 10 well for starters Acer continues to cover most of the internal connections with what looks like to be kept on tape now while this translucent film can both insulate the connection and help hold the wires in place there are plenty of PC and connector designs that don't require its use and it makes removing and replacing the components a bit more difficult than it really needs to be I also found it frustrating that you can't remove some components without first removing another unrelated piece of hardware for example you must remove the speakers and volume power buttons circuit board before removing the battery lastly the LCD screen is permanently joined to the front panel with what appears to be a form of thermoplastics taking this process eliminates the need for screws but makes it nearly impossible to replace one without replacing the other and for the interesting Acer is clearly using the same case for both the Wi-Fi only a 510 and the 3G enabled a 511 there's a space inside the a five tens case for a separate cellular card and an empty spot on the motherboard for a SIM card slot aside from my complaints about its internal design the a 510 is a good tablet with decent hardware it has a 1.3 gigahertz quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor 32 gigs of storage and one gig of ram although it's ddr2 instead of the faster ddr3 and its external design may not be super slick or ultra thin but as CNN's Eric Franklin wrote it's one of the most comfortable tablets he's ever held I only wish that Acer had made it just as comfortable to crack open and repair and a c-more teardown photos check out my full cracking open gallery at TechRepublic comm forward slash cracking open I'm Bill Detweiler thanks for watching you