Technology is great.  Most of the time.  I work with PCs all day so I usually enjoy playing with techie stuff.  But the more you do, the more likely you are to run into unexpected issues.

Right now tablets are hot.  The ipad, Xoom, and Acer Iconia are but a few of the many brands jockeying for market share in this exploding technology segment.  I decided to jump on the bandwagon for several reasons.  In particular, I want to be able to test formatting my stories into different e-readers.  On a tablet, I can download the kindle for tablets and other e-readers on one platform.

After doing a lot of research, I decided to go with the Acer Iconia A500 tablet running the Android Honeycomb operating system.  I know these are newer than the ipads, slightly thicker, and not as mature.  But the Acer offers memory expansion, a USB port, and HDMI output.  For me, the expansion was important.

Overall, I like the Acer a lot.  It might have been wise to wait a few more months until it was a little more mature, but I’m finding it to be a great tablet.  With that said, I am shaking my head in amazement right now from one problem I’m having.

The A500 comes with a USB cable to connect and sync with PCs.  Great.  The generic sync program works pretty well, but only covers basics like contacts and calendar.  There are a bunch of apps to download from the app store that will sync other things, like documents, e-books, etc.

But they don’t work.

The problem is that the Acer connects to my PC as an external device, but it is not assigned a drive letter (like C – the main pc drive, D – the cd drive, etc).  These other programs do not recognize it because it is not listed in the available drives.  Yes, I can manually move files I want over to the Acer, but I can’t take advantage of these other auto-sync programs.

After wasting a couple hours scouring the internet for solutions that didn’t help, I broke down and contacted Acer support.  First, I tried the realtime chat.  After spending almost half an hour explaining the problem, providing the serial number, etc, the chat support rep told me to call Acer tech support.  They could help.

I did.  Didn’t help.  I wasted more time explaining the problem again, giving them my information, only to be told I had to be transferred to level 2 support.  After explaining the problem for the third time, the support rep actually plugged another tablet into his own pc to see what happened, and confirmed I was right – no drive letter assigned.

All of this is not unexpected when dealing with support.  I could handle it.

But what blew my mind was when he said, “Looks like there’s no way to make this work.  Sorry.”

That was it.  No workaround, no resolution.  How can a mainstream OS that is supposedly designed to work with Windows not provide a way for its own apps to function?  He told me that hopefully the fix would be in the next honeycomb update scheduled next week, but had no way to see if it would be.

I know this technology is new, but I’m still scratching my head that this function was overlooked.  Welcome to the bleeding edge.

I still love the tablet.  I’ll manually move files for now, and hope that this gets fixed soon.  Once this is working, the biggest hurdle I’ve found with adopting this new technology will be overcome.