Help Installing ICS on the Acer Iconia Tab A500

[neoteotihuacan]

Hi all! I just bought an Acer Iconia tab A500 Honeycomb thingie and I love it. My Nexus S was getting lonely and I could not fathom getting an iClone Tab.

I know that there is an Alpha build floating around and it is not recommended for installation yet. Sadly, this is all of the information I can squeeze out of the mighty Google concerning the Iconia A500 and Ice Cream Sandwhich. My question to all of you is this: Is there a source of information that I am overlooking? Do recommend that I keep up with a particular website/s?

I am pretty excited about ICS and this tablet is looking awful lonely.

neo

 

[MrRussells]

I have recently brought my tablet too. I have been looking into ICS and it looks like we should be getting this end of January.

MrRussells

 

[philandroid333]

Curious to know where you heard about ICS coming to the A500 at the end of January? Any links?


Thanx
PA333
[FONT=&quot][/FONT]

 

[MrRussells]

Acer Iconia Tab A500 and A100 Getting Scoops of Ice Cream Sandwich in January 2012?

This is the link that I found about ICS hope this helps

MrRussells

 

[weddle]

Awesome! Hopefully they follow through! Im definitely excited...

 

[MrRussells]

I'm excited too off out to get my HTC Sensation this weekend too hopefully.

 

[MahaloCat]

neoteotihuacan

Two Alpha's out there. xda has one by lonewolf -
tegraowners.com has one by thor.

 

[splatoid]

Forum TegraOwners • View topic - [Dev]A500 ICS AOSP device building

Here's a link to thors page. Its coming along nicely.

 

[lechuga]

Ok then, it's January now, what's going on ACER HQ !?!?!?

Comoooonnn ...

 

[mplevy]

lechuga, the leaks reported it would be the END of January, we're still in single-digit dates in January, be patient.

 

[kenji57]

Just curious, what's missing/broken in honeycomb 3.2 that you are hoping ICS will fix?

 

[nieltab]

I have read on the internet that ICS will follow soon after these 2 smaller updates that came out.

Does anyone know what these smaller updates changed except the new market and faster keyboard?

 

[Cactrot]

Love my a500 too! I have one nagging problem with mine--filling out and editing web forms, especially YouTube comments where the a500 becomes virtually unusable with a key lag of several seconds. I posted a video of its bizarre behavior. Acer took it back for repair and it was reset but still does it.

Search youTube for: "Android text editing is driving me crazy." -

 

[chismay]

Love my a500 too! I have one nagging problem with mine--filling out and editing web forms, especially YouTube comments where the a500 becomes virtually unusable with a key lag of several seconds. I posted a video of its bizarre behavior. Acer took it back for repair and it was reset but still does it.

Search youTube for: "Android text editing is driving me crazy." -

damn thats fecked hope you can get it sorted mate.

im waiting for ICS because i want the mighty face rec' unlocking

 

[chismay]

Love my a500 too! I have one nagging problem with mine--filling out and editing web forms, especially YouTube comments where the a500 becomes virtually unusable with a key lag of several seconds. I posted a video of its bizarre behavior. Acer took it back for repair and it was reset but still does it.

Search youTube for: "Android text editing is driving me crazy." -

maybe this vid will help? Honeycomb Lag Explained - YouTube

 

[Zoandroid]

The video presents interesting facts I did not know. Although you could have told the information just once and made the video shorter.

But what I would like to suggest is that, if you are using the stock browser to access the forum posts you mentioned above, try a different browser. Text input lag in forum posts has always been an issue for me going back 3 Android devices.....IF.....I use the stock browser to access the forums.

However, Opera Mobile helps considerably with reducing typing lag. And Opera Mini (if you can make it run in a stable fashion on your device) helps even more. But I had to abandon it a year ago because their updates made it unstable on the LG Ally I was using then.

Opera Mobile works well on my A500 tablet, and is noticeably smoother for me when typing a posting on this and other forums.

As another suggestion, I have alleviated the frustrations often experienced while trying to position the cursor with just my finger for typo fixing when using the stock keyboard, and typing into forum post windows. I now use Super Keyboard, which has some very nice cursor movement arrow keys. Another I tried is Hacker's Keyboard, which has the arrows too. But I chose Super Keyboard because it also lets me adjust the volume of the key feedback sounds, something Acer should have built into this tablet to keep from annoying those around you when typing with the sounds on.

I wonder if anyone over on XDA has looked into the video lagging issue on this tablet? Perhaps a driver update from one of our wonderful devs might help.

 

[Zoandroid]

On the ICS front, from what I have read posted by those who have tried the aforementioned ROMs built on ICS, one thing they found out quickly is that most of the apps we have now for Froyo and Honecomb don't run well on ICS, due to some of the major changes it will bring about. So although getting ICS right now would be cool, it might not be as cool as we hope until the app vendors re-code their apps to run on it.

 

[Cactrot]

One of the reasons I ditched my iPad was to get cursor keys. As far as the keyboard is concerned, the lag is the same with the Apple BT keyboard. Finally it is better with my HTC View but it acts up differently. When I tap the cursor to the end of the text, the backspace key suddenly morphs into a delete key. It's annoying and must have something to do with scaled text.

 

[splatoid]

I'm using the ipad for work and it is different for sure. I don't care for it but its not all that bad. The typing for me on the 3g network is perfect no lag what so ever. But I still like my Acer better.

 

[alienwithin]

some of you may be interested in the Acer on the Acer ANZ facebook fanpage in reply to a question asking about ICS. NZ/Aussie are typically the first wave of updates



Acer ANZ Hi people, we plan to have an ICS upgrade for A500 Wi-Fi tablets available around April of this year. Sorry to keep you waiting...enjoy your Iconias!

 

[Zoandroid]

That's interesting. All the US Acer support folks would tell me is that they have "no information" regarding ICS coming to the A500.

 

[lechuck]

I guess that Acer won't release anything at least until end of frebruary... better if sooner, but anyway, I'm testint Thor's ROM and its wonderful.

ICS is MUCH faster and MUCH smoother than Honeycomb. Apps load instant, the desktops and icons move superfast and it has some nice things over Honeycomb, like for example, the "recent applications" button shows them like in honeycomb, as a column of thumbnails, but now you can remove them from the list (I think you actually even close them if they're in memory) just dragging them aside... this also happen with notifications, you can dismiss single notifications dragging them aside.

I'm using Thor's ROM as daily driver now, knowing that the camera doesn't work (I don't normally use it) and I think that HDMI sound isn't working either.

Finally, yeah, there are some issues with some apps, but these are the least, I play all my games, and every few days thor is publishing new RCs that fix previous unworking apps...

At this moment, I have working:

Polaris office
Facebook
Twitter
ES File Explorer
Google apps (all of them except the ones using cam)
Tapatalk
Currents
Music
MX Movie Player
PowerAmp
... and more

And for games:

Bang Bang Racing
Cut the rope
Fruit Ninja
Pinball HD for Tegra
Reckless Getaway
Reckless Racing
Samurai II: Vengeance
Shine Runner for Tegra
Sprinkle
Gameloft Uno
Zen Pinball THD
GTA III
... and some more...

Cheers!

 

[Zoandroid]

The stock A500 comes with a demo of Heroes of Sparta. When I played it, the sound was a bit twitchy. I wonder if ICS brings anything to the table to help that kind of issue?

 

[MrWareWolf]

use a full keyboard if you have to..

My a500 seems to work fine with my old Logitech g11, including the volume knob..handy..

Sadly my Logitech cordless mouse does not work in the g11 USB ports, nor does anything else in those ports on android.

My USB hub worked fine on the a500 initially, but doesn't work now for some reason. Not a big deal.

 

[Zoandroid]

It might be a lack of sufficient power being provided to the A500's USB port.

Your idea is something that had never even occurred to me. I use a G11 keyboard too, and I have my cordless mouse's Bluetooth dongle plugged into one of the G11's USB ports. I'll have to see if it might actually work plugged into the A500. Wouldn't you need a driver of some sort? I don't suppose any of my programmed macros could be utilized.

The G11 keyboard works very well! But I can't think of an Android app that might utilize a mouse? So I couldn't test trying to use the mouse. The tablet isn't stock ROM anymore, so I don't have the game mentioned above installed anymore.