Acer Iconia Tab A100 Android 3.0 tablet out this month for £300

Samsung's Galaxy Tab set the scene for 7-inch Android tablets, but it's facing ferocious competition this year. Acer's Iconia Tab A100 goes on sale on 20 April according to Amazon UK, which has slapped a £300 price tag on the Wi-Fi version of the device.

It's the baby brother of the bigger A500, and was on show at Mobile World Congress in February this year, where we managed to clumsily break the case of a pre-production version simply by pulling the headphones out. We're assuming the final model -- unpawed by hundreds of MWC attendees -- will be more robust.

Unlike the Galaxy Tab, the Iconia Tab A100 is launching with Android 3.0 Honeycomb software, which has been designed for tablets rather than smart phones. We've not had a chance to see how Honeycomb fares on a smaller 7-inch display though, since the pre-production model was running Android 2.3.

The A100's 1,024x600-pixel screen has a 16:9 aspect ratio, and is backed up by a speedy dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and 512MB of RAM. There's a rear-facing 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus, and a front-facing 2-megapixel cam for video calls. Connectivity includes HDMI, USB and mini-USB.

According to Amazon, the A100 will also tie in to Acer's clear.fi cloud service, which detects your other PCs and smart phones, then lets you search for music, photos and videos on your home network, streaming them to the tablet and back. We're a bit hazy about whether this only works with Acer devices, though.

Amazon also has a product listing for the Iconia Tab A101, which is identical except for the addition of 3G, with a higher price of £400. It too will be shipping on 20 April according to the online retailer. With the Motorola Xoom and Asus Eee Pad Transformer both out this week, and Sony mulling its own Android tablets for release later in the year, Android is gearing up to give Apple's iPad 2 some serious competition in the weeks and months ahead, just as it has done for smart phones.