Acer Iconia Tab 10
An arresting display lifts an otherwise unremarkable tablet – keep an eye out for confirmed pricing
The Iconia Tab 10 is a big brother to the Iconia One 10. That’s “big” purely in the figurative sense, mind you: physically it’s exactly the same size, and the casing has the same unfortunate plasticky feel.
There are a decent few differences to discover, however. Ergonomically, the major change is a move of the volume rocker to the front of the chassis; it now falls under your left thumb when you hold the tablet in landscape mode. On the opposite side, Acer’s “MediaMaster” button cycles you through three preset video and audio profiles, designed for apps, music and movies respectively. It’s a distinctive feature, but the settings don’t make a huge difference, and the
switch hardly needs to be directly under your thumb at all times.
Flip up the little hatch at the top and you’ll also find that the Iconia One’s second micro-USB port has been replaced by a micro-HDMI output. That could be useful if you need to show video on a display that doesn’t support Android’s built-in casting capabilities.
But the biggest upgrade is to the screen. In place of the Iconia One’s horrible blocky panel, the Iconia Tab has a much sharper 1,920 x 1,200 display, with a not-quite-Retina pixel density of 224ppi. It’s far more vibrant too: although brightness and contrast figures are close to the Iconia One’s, its “quantum dot” technology delivers sumptuous colours, similar to those of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3.
Performance is also a big step up from the Iconia One 10. In the singlecore Geekbench 4 benchmark, the Tab 10 achieved nearly three times the score of the One: multi-core and gaming scores weren’t so impressive, but there’s enough power here to justify this as a mid-range tablet.
The Iconia Tab 10’s biggest weakness is battery life. Although it uses the same 6,100mAh battery as the One 10, it gave us just 8hrs 2mins of video playback before conking out. If you’re running more demanding apps, and sending data back and forth over Wi-Fi, you won’t get through a working day.
Despite its shortcomings, the Iconia Tab 10 is much more attractive than its anaemic stablemate. However, there’s one important factor that remains to be seen: this updated model, the A3-A50, is so new that Acer has yet to reveal pricing. If the 16GB Iconia Tab 10 costs under £225 then it becomes a tempting alternative to the Asus ZenPad 3S 10, which offers similar battery life and performance. It doesn’t come close to the luxury feel of the Asus, though, so if the price gets any higher than that, we’re out.