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We have collected 3 reviews of the Packard-Bell Liberty Tab. Experts rate Packard-Bell Liberty Tab 7.3/10. Reviewsor.com helps you find reviews, best prices, user reviews of the Packard-Bell Liberty Tab and Packard-Bell Touch Pad.
With so many manufacturers trying to emulate the iPad's sleek black bezel and paper-thin form factor, it's good to see a tablet that's a little different once in a while. Enter the Packard Bell Liberty Tab, available in cherry-red or brown with a stylish chrome frame and Android 3.0 Honeycomb under the hood. Anyone familiar with an Android smartphone will start to feel at home with the Liberty Tab very quickly. There are five separate homescreens, all fully customisable with widgets and applications. Swiping between the different homescreens is fast and responsive and a quick tap of the capacitive, multi-touch screen will open applications promptly. We had no trouble skipping through websites with the Flash-supporting browser and had the BBC homepage open in five seconds. If you're thinking this tablet looks familiar, it's because it's from the same stable as the Acer Iconia Tab A500 and, like the Iconia, has Nvidia's Tegra 2 processor at its heart. This keeps performance strong and on a par with other Tegra 2 tablets, such as the Motorola Xoom. In terms of weight, it's a fairly hefty tablet – especially when compared to the light 7-inch Galaxy Tab or the iPad 2.
Packard Bell is a subsidiary of Acer so the two companies occasionally share the same products. The Liberty Tab is one such product - it's essentially an Iconia Tab A500 with Packard Bell branding.Unlike the Iconia Tab A500 which has been available for a few months, the Liberty Tab was introduced more recently. In terms of the underlying hardware the Liberty Tab is a carbon copy of the A500; it uses the same CPU, the same amount of memory, offers the same screen, WiFi and camera options as Acer's tablet. The only slight difference that we were able to spot was that the Packard Bell's microSD slot can accept a maximum card size of 32GB, whereas the Acer can tackle 64GB cards.Despite the nearly identical hardware however the Tab was a different beast in terms of the experience it delivered. The Liberty seemed more sluggish than the A500 on the performance front; we noticed a bit of lag when panning from home-screen to home-screen. The Liberty was also slower when it came to our web page load tests; whereas the Liberty took 14 seconds to load CNN.com, the Iconia got the job done in 12 seconds in our July 2011 grouptest. We suspect that given time Packard Bell will optimise the Liberty so it's just as quick as Acer's offering.
Packard Bell has been part of the Acer group since 2008. Acer launched its own Android 3 touch tablet, the Iconia Tab A500, in April. Rather than starting from scratch with it's June release of the Liberty Tab, Packard Bell has used the Iconia Tab as its starting point. The result is something that is theoretically identical, or almost, to the Iconia Tab A500. The processor is the same, a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core with 1 GB of RAM. There are up to 32 GB of storage under the glossy shell and a microSD slot allows you to add an additional 32 GB. The PVA panel comes with a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution. There's plenty of connectivity with a micro-HDMI, a USB 2.0 Host port and a proprietary connector on the underside to plug in your accessories (multimedia dock or keyboard). There's a 5 megapixel photo-video sensor with an LED flash on the back and a 2 megapixel sensor on the front for webcam usage. The Liberty Tab will be on sale as of the end of June 2011 for around £350 in its 16 GB version and something under £450 for the 32 GB. 3G models are also planned for the forthcoming weeks. This is a little more then than Packard Bell had originally led us to believe, which is a shame.