If you’re craving some Ice Cream Sandwich goodness but can’t quite justify $399 for a new ASUS Transformer Pad 300, we feel you. Times are tough, and tablets – we freely admit – are a luxury. But if you can scrounge together about $240, you can grab a brand new Acer Iconia Tab A500, which has just been updated to Ice Cream Sandwich with a free helper app to boot. Sure, it’s not the best 10-inch Android tablet out there – but right now, it’s the best 10-inch Android tablet for $240.
The deal is going on over at eBay. Don’t worry, this isn’t somebody who picked up a shipment of tablets off the back of a truck: Acer’s selling them from their official corporate account. Shipping’s free too – something an old-school eBay user like yours truly learns to check for. Yes, the units in question are refurbished, but they also come with a 90-day warranty and are more than a hundred dollars off the list price, plus sixty dollars off similar refurbished tablets elsewhere.
If your memory’s rusty, the Iconia Tab A500 uses a Tegra 2 processor, a full gigabyte of memory and a 1280×800 10.1-inch display. The model on sale on eBay is just 8GB, but you can augment that with a MicroSD card. It’s also got a handy HDMI-out port. If you’re still not sure, read our review. For those of you who pull the trigger, go here to get the skinny on how to update your tablets to Android 4.0 right away.
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As far as buying/saving on eBay in general goes:
If you see an item that you want listed in auction format, send the seller a message asking if they will accept $x to end the auction early and sell the item to you. If that doesn’t work, use a sniping service such as Bidball.com to bid for you. It’ll bid in the last few seconds, helping to save $ and avoid shill bidding.
If there is a particular item that you want that is relatively rare on eBay or goes fast when one is listed, use ebuyersedge.com to set up a saved eBay search for it. You’d get an e-mail whenever a match is listed. You can use the price, category, exclude word, etc. filters to narrow down the results that you get in the e-mails. Excellent for “Buy It Now”s priced right.
If the item that you’re looking for is difficult to spell, try a misspelling search site like Typojoe.com to find some deals with items that have main keywords misspelled in the title. Other interested buyers may never see them.
thanks parker313; am new to ebay and android – so welcome any other tips as well