Get ready to embrace the cheapest Honeycomb tablet in the market. Acer has finally launched its 10.1-inch Iconia Tab A500 that is loaded with Google’s Android 3.0 operating system aka Honeycomb.

The A500 uses a 10.1-inch display with a 1280×800 resolution, so it will be similar in size and form factor to the Motorola Xoom. It’s actually a bit heavier (1.69 lbs. vs. 1.61 lbs) and fractionally thicker (.52” vs. .51”) than the Xoom, but since these are tablets rather than smartphones it’s unlikely anyone will notice. What they will notice is differences in styling; the A500 has a brushed aluminum casing that looks quite nice in the photos we’ve seen, unlike the Xoom which has a brownish back plate.

Other features of the A500 are pretty standard. There’s the now-common Tegra 2 dual-core Cortex A9 processor that’s paired with Nvidia’s ULP GeForce graphics and 1GB of RAM. There are front- (2MP) and rear-facing (5MP) cameras, an HDMI port for viewing content on an external display (1080p supported), 802.11bgn WiFi, 16GB flash memory on the initial device (with 32GB versions planned for the future), and a micro-SD expansion slot capable of accepting up to 32GB micro-SD cards.

The tablet comes with two 3260mAh Li-polymer batteries rated for up to eight hours of casual gaming or HD video playback and 10 hours of WiFi Internet browsing. Another piece of hardware is the six-axis motion-sensing gyro, which can be useful for games (and detecting orientation of the tablet). Finally, there’s a built-in GPS, and Bluetooth support allows the A500 to connect to a variety of peripherals, common stuff for tablets these days.

Now, the operating system as we already know is Google’s Gingerbread, but Acer also added a few extras for you guys. Since it’s a Tegra 2 platform, you get the Tegra Zone, and there are free games being thrown in, like Need for Speed: Shift and Let’s Golf. Adobe’s Flash is also supported, but it doesn’t come pre-installed, which is easy enough to rectify. Given that Google has expressed an interest in standardizing the Android experience and avoiding fragmentation, there’s not a lot of unusual software added on the A500.

Acer includes their LumiRead and Google Books apps for enjoying eBooks, Zinio for full-color digital magazines, and a trial version of Docs to Go for office documents. Naturally, users all get full access to the Android Marketplace for installing additional applications. The A500 also includes clear.fi for digital media sharing, so it can communicate over your wireless network with any other DLNA-compliant devices to share multimedia content.