Acer has recently announced the addition of a MeeGo based tablet, the M500 to its Iconia tablet range at Computex 2011.
Judging from the available pictures and videos of the Iconia M500 [tracking page], it bears a striking physical resemblance to it’s Android stable-mate, the A500, and has the same 10.1 inch 1280×800 resolution screen.
The key difference is that it has a Intel based Moorestown processor under the hood.
There is no information on the M500’s battery life at the moment — I will be interested to how good the battery life will be running MeeGo on a Moorestown processor. Chippy’s written a interesting article on battery life advantages of MeeGo and Android running on the Moorestown platform that’s a good read.
The M500 offers a MeeGo driven user interface which Acer is calling a ‘snackable UI’. This is essentially a circular shape launcher widget (pictured above) that can be used to access and operate applications such as a browser or a music player. What I find unique is that the user touches the screen using five fingers in a circular shape (see picture below) in order to invoke the widget.
The M500 uses a widget based homepage and the eye candy offering is live widgets meaning that each widget will present its content when activated, allowing the user to view multiple live widgets content at a glance. Some notable widgets that were showcased during the Computex demos were for photo, video, calendar, social network feeds and time.
Acer has yet to announced a firm date for M500’s release and likewise, pricing is not known. Let’s hope that it will not be too far off the sub $500 mark of the A500.
