Some of you may be aware that we recently attended an event held in London where Acer showcased their new 7.9″ Android Jelly Bean Iconia A1 tablet. After spending some time with the tablet, here’s our quick review on what we thought of the new upcoming low cost tablet.
Design
With prices starting from £149, Acer has launched the Iconia A1 up against rivals such as the Nexus 7, Asus Fonepad and Galaxy Note 8.0 with a highly competitive price tag. Yet for this money, at first glance, there is little compromise. While you do get quite hard, scratchy silver plastics along the sides and white cover round the back of the tablet, the Iconia A1 has an overall rigid construction that inspires confidence.
Unfortunately, the Iconia A1 is 10.5mm thick and 400g in weight, despite its small form factor, it feels heavy to hold and is not what we would describe as sleek. Certainly after using it with one hand for awhile, we really felt the weight of it and started to hold it with both hands which made it less noticeable.
On the left side of the Iconia, there are no slots or ports. On the right edge there’s a microSD memory card slot and a microHDMI video output. These, and the pinhole mic that sits between them, are laid out clearly but without much passion for design.
Features
The Acer Iconia A1 features LED-backlit IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, running on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, Quad-core 1.2 GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal memory.