Hardware and Looks

The Acer Iconia Tab A500 has a 10.1 inch touchscreen that offers 1280×800-pixel resolution.

On the front you will also see a 2 megapixel camera for video calling. However, on the front you won’t find any physical buttons.

The normal home and back buttons of any Android device are replaced by virtual buttons on screen. You can see the buttons in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.

The advantage of this placement is that if you shuffle between portrait and landscape orientations, the buttons are always on the lower left-hand side of the display.

There’s another button at the lower left corner which gives access to all recently used apps.

On the back of the tablet you will see a 5 megapixel camera. The built quality of A500 gives a cheap feeling because they have mainly used plastic.

There is an orientation lock key and volume adjustment key on the top edge of the tablet. The device also features a Micro SD card slot, a SIM card slot, micro-USB port and micro-HDMI port.

On top of A500 is a headphone socket. The tablet is 13.3mm thick and weighs 765g. That means its 164g heavier than the iPad 2. The A500 runs on the Tegra 2 processor and has 1GB of RAM.

Display and Camera
The 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 TFT LCD of A500 is a visual delight. Another plus point of the display is its viewing angle.

You can position the tablet at any angle and still the readability remains very good. Though the readability reduces significantly under sun, it performs pretty well indoor conditions.

The 5 mega-pixel rear camera takes nice photos under a bright sky and front camera is just ok. But the main problem is that cameras lose the focus if you try to capture anything away from it and produces blurry images. Despite the 720p HD video capturing capability, the captured video quality is not good at all.

Software and Performance
Acer’s Iconia Tab A500 runs on Android 3.0, a specially customized OS for the tablets and it certainly works like a breeze.

A500 features a great browser with Flash support. You can open multiple tabs and multi-task. The Honeycomb on screen keyboard is a delight. It supports multi-touch, so you can touch type.

You can also hold down the shift key or number key to get quick access to certain characters. The Gmail client, music player, calendar, photo browser, chat and maps application works brilliantly.

The apps in the Android Market for the Honeycomb devices are not so many and Google should look into this matter as the common Android apps can not utilize the screen space of the tablets. The tablet runs on pair of 3260mAh batteries and offers almost 7 hours of battery life.

Final Verdict
The overall performance of Iconia Tab A500 is good. But there are some negative points too. It’s a very heavy tablet, battery life is little poor, and compared to some tablets its price is bit high.

While ASUS Eee Pad Transformer is priced at $400 with almost the same facilities, A500 is priced at $450.

That’s impressive growth from the 4 million users the company had a year ago (they had two million in late 2009). Dropbox enables people to sync files and media across platforms and devices, in order to have them available from any location. The service also allows people to easily and quickly share files with others. Dropbox provides users with 2 GB of space for free, and they can pay for more.

People use dropbox for personal storage, file syncing between machines, and group collaboration on projects. They have desktop software for the usual OSs, and mobile access, that makes things run smoothly.

They are much more tight lipped on revenue and profitability, though. Guesses range all over the place, but the company is certainly efficient with bandwidth and storage. They likely only upload unique files. Common files, like songs and movies, aren’t re-uploaded repeatedly.

Plugins such as Flash, Silverlight and Java have added media incorporation to the Web, but not without some cost. In search of an improved user experience and battery life, Apple has merely dropped support for some of these plugins completely on mobile devices, leaving much of the media related Internet remote on iPads and iPhones. HTML5 includes numerous new features, and streamlines functionality in order to provide these processor-intensive add-ons unnecessary for many common functions.

Supercilious content providers sign on many, this means you won’t have to worry much about installing yet another plugin just to snoop to a song surrounded in a blog or watch a video on YouTube. Similarly, this is a big deal for platforms that either don’t support Flash (e.g., iPhone and iPad), or have well documented problems with it (e.g., Linux). It will be an exacting benefit to those smart phones for which supporting Flash has confirmed challenging.

HTML5′s most publicized features are media playback and offline storage. With HTML4, websites frequently have to attain for Flash or Silverlight to merely show a video or play music. HTML5 lets websites openly embed media with the simple HTML tags “” and “” – no plugins needed. There are some issues presently being deliberated by the powers that be, and a predominantly oppressive one deals with file format.

Some companies, particularly Mozilla, are approaching for the acceptance of the open-source Ogg format, which is free for anyone to use. Others, like Apple, would choose the higher quality H.264 format, which will ultimately need browser makers to pay licensing fees to support it.

The additional major addition that has acquired media consideration is the capability to store offline data for Web apps. One of the major roadblocks in the march to substitute traditional desktop apps has been that the Web-based ones are inadequate without an Internet connection.

Google is shifting its focus to HTML5. This will be proficient in creating files in Google Docs or draft e-mails when away from an Internet connection. These changes would be repeatedly synced the next time you’re online. HTML5 also adds new communicating features, like drag-and-drop, that have previously found their way into Gmail.

Advantages of HTML5

Most probable, you’re previously taking benefit of it without knowing. Safari – both mobile and desktop, Google Chrome and Firefox 3.6 all support at least some elements of HTML5. And many Google products already use some features of the next-generation protocol. If you’re using Safari or Chrome or IE, you can check out an experimental version of YouTube that makes use of HTML5′s video features.

Most of them think that HTML5 is the future of the Internet. It is estimated that HTML5 will reach W3C Recommendation by late 2010.

Why XForms?

* XForms is the next generation of HTML forms
* XForms is richer and more flexible than HTML forms
* XForms will be the forms standard in XHTML 2.0
* XForms is platform and device independent
* XForms separates data and logic from presentation
* XForms uses XML to define form data
* XForms stores and transports data in XML documents
* XForms contains features like calculations and validations of forms
* XForms reduces or eliminates the need for scripting
* XForms is a W3C Recommendation

XForms Is The Successors Of HTML Forms

Forms are an important part of many web applications today. An HTML form makes it possible for web applications to accept input from a user.

Today, ten years after HTML forms became a part of the HTML standard, web users do complex transactions that are starting to exceed the limitations of standard HTML forms.

XForms provides a richer, more secure, and device independent way of handling web input. We should expect future web solutions to demand the use of XForms-enabled browsers (All future browsers should support XForms).

XForms Separate Data From Presentation

XForms uses XML for data definition and HTML or XHTML for data display. XForms separates the data logic of a form from its presentation. This way the XForms data can be defined independent of how the end-user will interact with the application.

XForms Uses XML To Define Form Data

With XForms, the rules for describing and validating data are expressed in XML.

XForms Uses XML To Store And Transport Data

With XForms, the data displayed in a form are stored in an XML document, and the data submitted from the form, are transported over the internet using XML.

The data content is coded in, and transported as Unicode bytes.

XForms Is Device Independent

Separating data from presentation makes XForms device independent, because the data model can be used for all devices. The presentation can be customized for different user interfaces, like mobile phones, handheld devices, and Braille readers for the blind.

Since XForms is device independent and based on XML, it is also possible to add XForms elements directly into other XML applications like VoiceXML (speaking web data), WML (Wireless Markup Language), and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).

XForms Is A W3C Recommendation – XForms 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2003.