[Acer Iconia A500] michaelh99:
Problems I've got with the Acer A500:

GPS is very weak. I get the best reception with the back of the unit facing the sky but in normal orientation I'm lucky to get 5 sats.

Compass doesn't work, always 90deg off

Digitizer unresponsive 3 times, had to power off each time. Strangely enough, the last time this happened the buttons at the bottom (home, menu, etc) still worked but nothing responded when tapped on the main screen area.

Have to be careful about plugging and unplugging items while the device screen is off. The headset icon is still showing in the tray after having disconnected a cable last night when the screen was off. Have seen problems where external USB devices aren't scanned if the screen is off.

System shut down 1 time after showing a low power notice. I was at 80%. Haven't had this happen again.

Market, Maps, Firefox crash a lot. The latter is probably Mozilla's fault but the core apps shouldn't be this crash-happy.

Bluetooth sharing only shows visible devices and not paired devices. What's the F-ing point of pairing if I have to make a device visible before I can send a file to it?

No media scanner notification. It takes a while to scan external USB media and there's no indication the scanning is going on. The only indication that it's done is when media starts appearing in apps like gallery. On older revs of the OS there is a notice that scanning is ongoing.

Copy/paste annoying. Especially that you can't paste if there's no text in your editor!!! In 2.2 you tap once to bring up the picker/caret (don't know what the google term is) and you tap that to get a popup menu for copy/paste/delete. On the Acer you have to double-tap to select text and only then do you get a menu on the top of the screen. Trouble is, if you have no text in your document you can't paste because there's no text to select!

Can't turn the d**n sound off on the camera.

Have to drill down into the settings turn the "ringer" off to mute the system. Why isn't there a dropdown icon for that?

Some of these are certainly Acer's fault and are related to hardware specific to this device. The UI elements I'm left wondering about. This is the only Gingerbread device I've really used and I can't tell how much is default behavior and how much Acer messed with the OS and borked it.

It's possible I've become spoiled by the devs on XDA. I'm coming from a Vibrant and the dev action is furious with that device. I've regularly upgraded my device with new ROMs on the order of every 2-3 weeks since October and I'm currently using 2.2.1 on my phone.

Given that the bootloader is locked (and encrypted?) I'm thinking dev action isn't going to happen real soon and I'm further thinking about returning this. I hate the idea of doing that because in a lot of ways this is a really nice tablet. It's got the form factor and weight I want. It's responsive. wifi is good enough for my purposes and I can carry it throughout home and work with no connection problems. I've found ways to make it part of my device chain (doc markup, blogging, reading, music playing) and the price was was low enough for me to give it a try. For the most part I like the device.

Trouble is, the bugs are like having someone standing next to you randomly poking you in the ribs. It's not enough to call the police but if he doesn't stop I'm going to punch him in the nose. With the Acer the bugs aren't bad enough for me to throw it out the window but they're getting bad enough that this thing may get returned.

For those in the know, how much of what I've complained about is normal Gingerbread and how much has Acer likely borked?

For reference my kernel is 2.6.36.3-00001-g9b3ce2b and build is Acer_A500_1.104.02_COM_GEN1