Acer Iconia One 7
The decent screen and low price aren’t enough to save this basic and cheap-feeling 7in tablet
SCORE PRICE £60 (£72 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290acer7
The Acer Iconia One 7 is one of two 7in tablets in this month’s labs, but while the Iconia One 7 is smaller, thinner and lighter than the Fire 7, we prefer the feel of Amazon’s device in the hand. Like its 10.1in brother, build quality isn’t a strong point of the Iconia One 7, with a lot more flex in the chassis than we would wish for.
All the buttons and ports are where you might expect them to be, with a 3.5mm jack and SD card slot on the top to supplement the 16GB of on-board storage.
The phone-like dimensions make using the Iconia One 7 to take photos more sensible than most tablets, but – how can we put this without being cruel? – the 2MP rear camera and 0.2MP front camera are unlikely to help you win Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
Acer equips the Iconia One 7 with a quad-core MediaTek MT8163 CPU running at 1.3GHz, with a miserly 1GB of RAM in support. A Geekbench 4 single-core score of 623 and multicore result of 1,734 are similar to the other budget tablets on test this month, and mean that this tablet is okay for basic web browsing and content consumption, but nothing more. This isn’t a machine you’ll enjoy using.
A result of 7.6fps in GFXBench Manhattan means light gaming is just about okay, but one look at the graphs on p93 should make it clear where the Iconia One 7 stands in relation to other tablets. Only the Fire 7 performs worse.
Then we come to arguably the weakest area for the Iconia One 7 in our tests: battery life. The 2,780mAh cell gave up after only 6hrs 9mins of constant use when looping our test video, so if you’re doing anything at all arduous then you can expect that figure to fall to around five hours.
There is one surprising area of strength for this device, though, and that’s its screen. The display on the Iconia One 10 was a disappointment, but its little brother shines – in comparison at least. That’s in part because they share the same 1,280 x 720 resolution, which is far better suited to the smaller screen. Indeed, the Iconia One 7’s 210ppi pixel density is superior to the Amazon Fire 8 HD. The colours are also stronger than the Iconia One 10 and white balance is more accurate than the Fire 7.
So which to buy? Sadly for Acer, that question is easy to answer. While the Acer Iconia 7 offers better performance and a sharper screen than the Fire 7, Amazon’s family services, more robust build quality and cheaper price (wait for deals and it’s often just £40) still make the Fire 7 a better choice as a cheap tablet for your whole family.