In one of the more bizarre cases of Olympic Games sponsorship I’ve seen, Acer is stamping the Olympic rings logo on the back of its next tablet, the Iconia Tab A510.
Corporations love to sponsor the Olympics. It’s advertising, but with the side benefit of appearing to care about human perseverance. Usually, though, Olympics sponsorship manifests itself in something disposable, like a can of Coke or a limited-time dipping sauce for your McNuggets.
(MORE: YouTube to Live-Stream the London 2012 Olympics for NBC)
Acer is going a step further by putting the rings on the back of a tablet, so that every time you want to browse the web or play with some apps, you’ll be reminded that Acer loves sport — even after the games are over. Does the tablet come with any built-in Olympics content, like a summer games companion app? Not that I can tell. The press release has only this to say:
The Acer Iconia Tab A510 is a special Olympic Games Tablet Edition of the Acer Iconia Tab line. It features the Acer and Olympic logos on the chassis to celebrate the company’s sponsorship of the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games.
Call me crazy, but I think sponsoring the Olympics should be its own reward, not something to be flaunted to users at every opportunity.
Anyway, the tablet itself doesn’t seem half-bad on paper. It has a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, a 10.1-inch 1280-by-800 resolution display, 32 GB of storage, a 5-megapixel rear camera, a 1-megapixel front-camera and 1 GB of RAM. Acer claims that the Iconia A510 gets up to 12 hours of battery life during video playback. Polaris Office 3.5 is included for editing documents. At $450, it’s $50 cheaper than Asus’ Transformer Prime, another quad-core Android tablet, and $150 cheaper than an iPad with the same storage capacity.
The Iconia Tab A510 will be in stores in a few weeks, though it’s available for pre-order now.
MORE: “Tablets: Why Should Somebody Buy This Instead of an iPad?”