The sweetest Honeycomb tablet we’ve seen so far packs modern Android goodness into a pocket-sized package, with a new OS version going far to solve Android tablets’ biggest problem to date: the lack of decent tablet-specific apps. But the 7-inch Acer Iconia Tab A100’s petite form means a battery that’s too small.

The Iconia Tab A100 is the first tablet shipping with Android 3.2. This is a big deal and a very good thing. The Android Market, home to more than 200,000 phone apps, is hideously broken for tablets, but Android 3.2’s new Zoom Mode convinces phone apps that they’re running on a smaller phone screen and magnifies text and images rather than filling in chunks of the screen with blank space.

$329.99 for 8GB; $349.99 for 16GB

This won’t be great for 10-inch tablets, but is kind of wonderful on a 7-inch device. I tried the Conan O’Brien Team Coco app, which looks awful on most tablets. In Zoomed mode, it’s tight and good-looking.

This isn’t a panacea, not by a long shot. Google still needs to fix the Android market for tablet owners. But it’s better than the experience on any other Android tablet so far.

The Acer Iconia A100 is one of our favorite tablets so far. It’s great for watching movies, video chatting, surfing the Web and playing with apps, until its teeny-tiny battery runs out. That battery gave us a mere 3 hours, 53 minutes of video playback on a charge, not enough for a cross-country flight. If not for the battery issue, it would’ve earned an Editors’ Choice nod.

Acer Iconia Tab A100 Verdict:

PROs:

Works well with many Android apps.

Great multimedia features.

CONs:

Short battery life.

Bloatware.

Looks a bit cheaply made.