Acer Iconia One 10
It's affordable, but a few nice features don't make up for poor performance and a low-quality screen
The Iconia One 10 is this month’s cheapest 1oin tablet. Unfortunately, it shows. The chunky plastic chassis feels anything but luxurious, and matters get worse when you turn on the screen: with a pixel density of just 149ppi, the Iconia One 10 has this month’s most blocky display. It’s also one of the dimmest screens here, with a maximum brightness of 298cd/m2. It looks like a cheap laptop panel from a decade ago: place the Acer Iconia One 10 next to an iPad and the comparison is downright embarrassing.
Under the bonnet, things initially look more promising, as the MediaTek MT8167 processor is the same model as found in the much pricier Asus ZenPad 3S 10. However, Acer’s implementation is clocked more slowly and has fewer cores, with the result that the Iconia One 10 struggled in the Geekbench benchmarks. In fact, in our field of 14 tablets, it ranked 13th, ahead only of Amazon’s dinky Fire 7 tablet. Graphical performance isn’t much better: we saw an average frame rate of just 9fps in the Manhattan 3 benchmark.
If you’re looking for a silver lining, you might hope that these low-power innards have a positive effect on battery life. Alas, there’s not much to celebrate here either. The Iconia One’s 6,100mAh battery isn’t tiny for a 10in tablet – it’s slightly larger than the battery found in the Asus ZenPad 3S 10, and its 9hrs 45mins of continuous video playback is quite a bit longer than the ZenPad managed. It’s still not an impressive result overall, though, placing the Iconia One 10 in the lower half of the table.
For all its faults, the Iconia One does have some nice touches. The charging LED is handy, letting you see at a glance when the unit is fully charged – although it’s not a proper notification LED, and won’t alert you to incoming messages and the like. The 32GB of storage is generous for the price, and there’s a microSD slot hiding under a flap at the top for easy expansion. Most unusually, under the same flap you’ll also find a second micro-USB connector, so you can plug in a peripheral such as a flash drive or a wired keyboard while charging at the same time.
Are those conveniences enough to make the Iconia One 10 a winner? Heck no. Even if you just want a basic tablet for reading emails and browsing the web, the Iconia One’s atrocious screen makes it impossible to love. If your budget won’t stretch beyond £150, you’re better off going for the Huawei MediaPad T3, or the much cheaper Amazon Fire HD 8: smaller devices, yes, but much nicer ones.