Acer Iconia Tab A100

There's been some debate about what, if any, requirements there are for a device to run Android 3.0, known as "Honeycomb". Minimum screen sizes, resolutions, and all manner of other specs have been bandied about as possible cut-off points for this version of Android, which is clearly optimized for tablets. Acer on Wednesday, however, showed PCMag a tablet that would suggest there aren't any requirements at all, and that Honeycomb might be ready for more than the specs we've seen so far.
The Acer Iconia Tab A100, for which neither pricing nor availability have been announced (though it's already available, for 299 pounds, in the UK), is the 7-inch sibling of the Iconia Tab A500. Its specs are similar—Nvidia's Tegra 2 processor, dual cameras, bright screen, and Android 3.0. What's interesting, though, is that it's running a full version of Honeycomb on a screen with a resolution of 1,024-by-600, well below the 1,280-by-720 many people thought Honeycomb required for a tablet.
The Iconia Tab A100 is the first 7-inch, 1,024-by-600 tablet that I've seen running Honeycomb, and in the few minutes I spent playing with the device it seemed to run smoothly. It's light and thin, with rounded edges and a smooth finish. The primary difference I noticed with the tablet (other than the screen size and resolution) was that it had an off-screen, capacitive Home button—the Honeycomb tablets we've seen to this point all rely on the ever-present on-screen Home, Menu, and Back buttons. My guess is that Acer will allow the black bar at the bottom to disappear when a video is playing, in order to use as much of the smaller screen as possible—that would necessitate a separate button.
All this, of course, raises questions about what requirements might actually exist for devices to run Honeycomb, or, if none exist as Google claims, what the optimal configuration might be. Every Honeycomb tablet we've reviewed here at PCMag has a dual-core, Nvidia Tegra 2 processor—does that mean that older tablets like the Cortex-A8-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab won't be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as PCMag's own Sascha Segan previously reported? Samsung Mobile is hosting an event on May 24, and there might be some updates then. Every device we've seen this far has at least an 8.9-inch screen—how will the Honeycomb experience translate to a smaller device?
Honeycomb's takeover of the Android tablet space has clearly only just begun, and just as we've seen Android 2.1 and 2.2 on a variety of screen sizes, resolutions, and devices, Android 3.0 certainly has life at screen sizes smaller than 9-10 inches. Though Google's intention is clearly for Honeycomb to run on larger devices for now, could we see the inverse of the Android-2.2-on-tablets problem, where the OS just isn't designed for the device? If that happens, and how the OS adapts to various specs and capabilities, is going to be an interesting development in the coming months.