[Acer Iconia A500] WereCatf:
This thread is an effort to try and quell some of the bickering on the forums -- like e.g. the claim that no one ever does anything useful here -- and to offer a common place to start for people who are new to the A500/A501 so that people wouldn't keep asking the same things over and over here. If you have something you think would be beneficial to add in this please leave a comment, all kinds of regularly-asked questions and answers, hints, tips and so on are welcome, though I do not promise to add everything in this first post.

I would appreciate if people left bickering, flaming, trolling to some other thread. Also, you shouldn't ask plain questions in this thread as they will possibly be lost in the comments eventually, possibly without anyone even noticing your question.

Oh, and one more thing: I am not a bot so I cannot be updating this every 5 minutes. I will try and do a daily sweep, but we'll see how it goes.

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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SECTION

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What is the A500?

The A500 is short for Acer Iconia Tab A500, a 10-inch Android tablet. It sports a dual-core Tegra2 CPU/GPU, 1GB RAM, one rear camera, one front camera, WIFI 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1, microSDHC slot (not mentioned anywhere by Acer but you can actually use microSDXC cards, too!) and 1280x800 resolution screen. A500's key selling point is its full-size USB port that you can use to attach all kinds of regular USB devices without any adapter cables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_Iconia_Tab_A500

What is the A501?

The A501 is exactly the same thing as A500 except there is a 3G module and SIM-card slot on the A501.

What about the A200?

The A200 is very similar to A500/A501, but uses different camera hardware, lacks the rear camera, and comes with less storage space. It also apparently has somewhat different partition layout (Someone confirm this?) than its bigger brothers and seemingly lacks accelerometer and ambient light sensor.

There is empty space inside the A500 where the 3G module would go, can I make A500 into A501?

Sorry, that's a no-go; there have been several people wondering about the same thing, but we simply do not have the diagrams and there's a lot of components missing. You'd just fry or short the motherboard trying to solder all the small, missing parts there unless you had soldering bot to aid you, and if you did have that you'd likely have much better things to do with your time anyways.

I see something called 'adb' mentioned here and there, what is it?

ADB is short for Android Debug Bridge, an application that is used for various kinds of low-level tasks on Android devices. If you have e.g. Acer's Acer Sync installed you'll already have adb.exe at C:\Program Files\Acer\Acer Sync\, or wherever you installed it. If you see directions telling you to write commands like "adb devices" on the command line but doing that doesn't work you could write the following first:

cd "Program Files\Acer\Acer Sync\"

and then try the commands you were told to do.

For more information see e.g. http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html

I see someone called 'Thor' mentioned here often and it always causes a fight, why?

'Thor', or rather 'Thor2002ro', is a developer who used to hang around on XDA before. After he stopped sharing whatever alterations he did to the Linux kernel source-code he got into trouble with XDA mods; not sharing the source-code modifications is a violation of the GPL license as Linux kernel itself is GPL licensed. Because of this links to his ROMs and website are prohibited here.

As for threads tending to turn into fights: well, there are people who feel very strongly about the GPL, there are people who simply do not care at all, and then there are people who do not even understand what it is all about. In such a situation things just tend to turn into fights, it's an unfortunate human trait.

More to come.

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HINTS AND TIPS

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To be filled out soon.

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FLASHING, ROMS AND ROOTING

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Can I install Linux on my tablet?

Yes, you can! It is however not for the faint of heart and can majorly screw up your system. Take a look at http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1158260. Another solution would be to install Linux in a chroot environment, ie. have both Android and Linux running at the same time with Android the dominating OS. This is a lot safer approach, but it also bears with it several disadvantages: no H/W acceleration and poor performance. For example https://market.android.com/details?id=com.zpwebsites.ubuntuinstall is one such solution.

How can I root my tablet?

If you are on stock Honeycomb 3.01 or 3.1 then just follow the guide at http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1138228. If you are on Honeycomb 3.2 (or newer) you can follow the directions at http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1307539 to root or use the instructions

at http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1276227 to go to an earlier version.

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I would appreciate it if you people requested sticky.