Acer Iconia One 10
Highly affordable for a 10.1in tablet, but it looks and feels cheap – and the screen is terrible
SCORE PRICE £99 (£119 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/290acer10
The Acer Iconia One 10 is tempting on paper. A 10.1in IPS screen for just £119? What’s not to like? Hold the Iconia One 10 in your hands, though, and the cost savings are apparent. While the coarse plastic body feels unpleasant, it’s the horrible silvery plastic that covers the stereo speakers that really makes the Acer tablet look like the budget offering it is – and these speakers don’t redeem themselves by sounding good, either. Both of the Amazon Kindle Fire tablets on test manage to be cheap without feeling it.
Acer’s logo placement suggests using the Iconia One 10 in landscape orientation by default, which makes the choice of placing the power and volume buttons on the top bezel a little odd. A flimsy plastic flap hides an SD card slot and the second of two micro-USB ports, so you can charge and add another storage device if needed. We would certainly advise using the SD card slot if you need to supplement the included 16GB of flash memory.
A 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek MT8167 resulted in Geekbench 4 scores of 534 and 1,467, making it the slowest 10in tablet on test. Even the £80 Amazon Fire 8 HD is quicker, albeit not by much. The Iconia One 10 is fine for general web browsing and
content consumption, though, and can even manage light gaming: it hit 9fps in GFXBench Manhattan, the same score as the Fire 8 HD.
There is a version of the Iconia One 10 with a Full HD screen, but sadly this isn’t the model on test. As such, gaming is an uninspiring experience on the dull, 1,280 x 800 resolution panel, which – with a pixel density of 149ppi – makes text look fuzzy and indistinct. Movies fare a little better, but we preferred watching films and shows on the smaller Amazon Fire 8 HD.
Battery life is better but not stellar. Despite its 6,100mAh capacity, which is respectable for a 10.1in device, the Iconia One 10 gave up looping our test video after 9hrs 37mins.
A 10.1in tablet for such a low price will always mean compromises, but Amazon has shown that it’s possible to design a low-cost tablet that doesn’t feel cheap. Despite offering a larger screen than the Amazon Fire 8 HD, we’d much rather spend our time using Amazon’s colourful device than the Iconia One 10.