Acer Iconia Tab A700 tablet boasts 1,080p, quad-core chip

Acer's A700 tablet, glimpsed at CES, is packing a mighty quad-core processor, Android Ice Cream Sandwich and a stonking full 1,080p screen resolution. In short, it promises to be quite the beast.

We had our hopes up earlier this year with Acer's announcement of the Iconia Tab A200, but were sadly underwhelmed by the dual-core processor and older version of Android. Acer has seriously upped its game with the A700, which looks set to challenge the behemoth that is the Asus Transformer Prime.

The high-end tablets we've seen so far (such as the Transformer Prime) have been offering screens with 1,280x800-pixel resolutions, so we're incredibly excited to properly lay our eyeballs on the A700 and see just what that 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution looks like. If the display is as bright and vivid as the Transformer Prime, the A700 may well be your new portable media best friend.

The 10-inch A700 will be running the latest version of Google's Android operating system, known as Ice Cream Sandwich, which is the same across phones and tablets, rather than the older 3.2 Honeycomb found on the A200, which was for tablets only. So far, the only other device we've seen that ships with ICS is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smart phone, although various phones and tablets are due to receive an upgrade, including the Prime.

Acer only gave a quick tease of the new tablet and was pretty light on details. It confirmed a quad-core processor, but said no more about it, although we're pretty sure it'll be the same Nvidia Tegra 3 chip found in the Transformer Prime.

There's no information about other features or indeed about pricing or UK availability, but Acer tentatively gave us a Q2 launch date.

Make sure to keep it CNET UK for all the best tech news -- and head over to our sister site CNET.com's CES coverage page for the latest gear from Las Vegas.