key specifications
- Evaluation Price: £139.99
- 7 inch screen with a resolution of 1,280 x 800
- Android 4.2
Down with the kids
A 7 inch tablet is perfect when you want something you can take almost anywhere. Budget tablets like the Acer Iconia One 7 at around £130 offer even more accessibility as they’re not devices you’re afraid of breaking.
It might not be a Nexus 7 smasher, but the One 7 looks like a solid little tablet for the kids.
SEE ALSO: Best cheap tablets
Acer Iconia One 7: Design
Color is what really sets the Iconia One 7 apart from much of the competition. It’s available in a range of light shades, 10 in all, that make ordinary black tabs as boring as a service manual.
The brighter ones are eye-catchers, but the Iconia One 7’s build is otherwise pretty simple. The back is made of hard plastic with a grippy embossed structure. It doesn’t have the soft finish of several other tablets, including the Nexus 7.
However, it is fairly slim and light – 8.95mm and 330g. This isn’t a tablet that requires two hands to hold. There’s also a memory card slot, something you don’t get with a Nexus 7.
Acer Iconia One 7: screen and features
However, the Acer Iconia One 7’s screen is a few notches below the best. It’s a 7-inch IPS panel with 1,280 x 800 pixels. While it’s not super sharp, it’s an IPS screen, so it doesn’t experience the serious contrast shifts seen on some of Acer’s previous budget tablets.
Colors are a bit weaker than the Asus Memo Pad HD 7, which is a shame. They look a little dim and the contrast is less than great. However, let’s not forget that this is a very cheap tablet.
The core specs are pretty modest too. The Iconia One 7 features a dual-core Intel Atom Z2560 processor clocked at 1.6 GHz, the same one used in some versions of the Asus Fonepad.
It’s not a very powerful chip, but it will be enough to play high-end 3D games. You might just be missing out on a few graphical effects that you would get with a high-end GPU.
The Iconia One 7’s interface is fairly similar to vanilla Android, but for some reason it sticks to Android 4.2 rather than the latest Android 4.4. We’re not sure why – its brother, the Iconia Tab 7, has Android 4.4.
Along with all the core Android features, you get a bunch of Acer apps and some “recommended” third-party apps preinstalled. It’s a little overboard as you only get 8/16GB of internal storage, but you should be able to uninstall at least some of it.
There are two other major compromises with the Iconia One 7 – the cameras and the battery life.
Some ultra-budget tablets choose to have a camera or none at all. But the One 7 has two. However, both are not of particularly good quality. The front is a VGA camera, the rear is a low-end 2-megapixel camera. You will not make masterpieces with this.
I have a feeling Acer decided to include them because the tablet is aimed at a fairly young audience who aren’t sophisticated enough to care too much about camera quality.
Perhaps the more serious issue is battery life. We haven’t been able to test it yet, but the Iconia One 7 is expected to only last seven hours. The Nexus 7 lasts a few hours longer in most conditions, and the iPad mini even longer.
First impressions
7 inch tablets have a tough time these days. It’s hard to recommend many when the Nexus 7 can be bought for under £150 these days. The Acer Iconia One 7 is not a Nexus distractor, but the given bright case should please the kids.
Next, read our roundup of the best tablets
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