Acer Iconia One 7 B1-750 review

The Acer Iconia One 7 packs a surprising punch for a £100 tablet. With one of Intel's quad-core Bay Trail Atom Z3735G processors and 1GB of RAM, the Iconia One 7 is deceptively quick for an entry-level tablet, and its performance levels aren't too dissimilar from our current budget favourite, the Tesco Hudl 2.

In our BaseMark OS II tests, for instance, the Iconia One 7's score of 869 is just 35 points behind the Hudl2's score of 906, so you're unlikely to notice any difference in speed when using its Android 4.4.4 operating system. Menu transitions are extremely smooth and lag-free and apps load up in a flash. This is great to see on such a low-end device, as budget tablets are often lumbered with slow CPUs that can make them a chore to use.  

The Iconia One 7 isn't bad for playing games, either. In our BaseMark X 1.1 graphics benchmark, it managed a respectable score of 11,789 with Medium graphics settings, which actually puts it in front of the Hudl2's score of 11,530. This is partly because the Iconia One 7 has a smaller, lower-resolution screen than the Hudl2, but it nevertheless managed to hit much higher overall frame rates in both the Hangar and Dunes tests, averaging 26.9fps and 17.9fps compared to the Hudl2's 17.8fps and 13.7fps.

The only area where the Iconia One 7 lagged behind Tesco's budget marvel was in our web browsing tests, as its score of 806 in BrowserMark pales in comparison to the Hudl2's 1,615. However, in practice we had few complaints when using the Acer tablet, as web pages loaded promptly and showed hardly any signs of noticeable judder when we scrolled up and down. The tablet didn't stumble over pages with large numbers of images either.

Battery life is comparable, too, as the Iconia One 7's 3,420mAh battery lasted 6h 40m in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to our standard 170cd/m2 brightness level, which is only 18 minutes shy of the Hudl2's score of 6h 58m under the same conditions. This isn't the greatest compliment, though, as this is still pretty poor by tablet standards. You'll almost certainly need to charge the Iconia One 7 every day if you want to use it on the commute, for instance, and other 7in tablets such as the Asus MeMO Pad 7 ME572C have almost double the stamina.

However, it doesn't take long to see why the Iconia One 7 only costs £100, as the tablet's build quality is poor. It's a relatively light and slender device, at just 8.6mm thick and weighing just 320g, and the textured soft-touch rear provides a decent amount of grip, but when a tablet creaks and groans with every touch, it doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence.

Likewise, we only had to apply a small amount of pressure to the sides of the tablet to see a rippling effect on the screen. As a result, we don't foresee this tablet lasting very long, particularly in the hands of a child, and we'd much rather spend a little more to get a higher quality device.

Display

This is a shame, as the Iconia One 7's 1,280x800 display is fairly good quality. Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 85.4% of the sRGB colour gamut, and its green and blue colour coverage was even across the sRGB colour space. The screen's only main weakness was its red and yellow coverage, but our test images still looked reasonably warm and vibrant.

The display is also pleasingly bright, with a peak white level of 433.2cd/m2. This is great for travelling, as it helps to keep the display visible in bright lighting conditions, such as when you're outside or have the sunlight streaming in while you're on the train. Blacks look a little grey as a result, though, and our mediocre black level measurement of 0.45cd/m2 confirmed this. However, the tablet's contrast ratio of 943:1 helped provide plenty of detail in our test images, and the screen's viewing angles are excellent, providing a clear image no matter how we held the tablet.

Camera

On the back you'll find a 5-megapixel camera. Although fine detail was in short supply in our outdoor photos, colours were still bright and accurate and noise was kept to a minimum. We did notice quite a lot of rainbow speckle in large areas of cloud, though, and the sheer number of blurred, fuzzy pixels means you probably won't want to use the camera for capturing important family moments. There's also an HDR mode, but this didn't really improve matters. Likewise, our indoor shots were even hazier, showing lots of blurry outlines and muddied areas of detail.

^ We don't expect 5-megapixel cameras to capture areas of minute detail, but we noticed a fair amount of rainbow speckle in larger areas of solid colour

If you're happy with just uploading basic snaps to social networks, though, the Iconia One 7 has plenty of fun photo modes that let you be a bit more creative with your snaps. You get a choice of four filters, various different types of collage shots, white balance controls and six camera modes, including panorama, night and landscape. The menu options are quite fiddly, though, as the mode wheel can be a little unresponsive at times and trying to tap the side menu often brings up the notifications bar instead.

^ The Iconia One 7's camera has plenty of different camera modes, but the quality of our indoor shots was even worse than those we took outdoors

Android

We also wish Acer didn't load its tablets with so many pre-installed apps and widgets, as they not only take up space on the Iconia One 7's already precious amount of storage space, but they also clog up your app tray with several unnecessary icons. For instance, the Iconia One 7 comes with 16GB of storage, but the sheer amount of bloatware takes up 1.1GB. Minus the space taken up by its Android 4.4.4 operating system, this leaves you with just 9.6GB for your own apps and files. Fortunately, the microSD card slot on the side of the tablet allows you to expand this up to 32GB.

That said, Acer has done very little to the overall appearance of Android, so at least you won't have to contend with fussy menu layouts or weirdly placed apps. You'll still need to remember to swipe down from the top-right for settings and the top left for notifications, but otherwise this stock version of Android is very easy and simple to use. We particularly like Acer's Double Tap feature, which you can use to wake the tablet from sleep mode, and you can even allow the tap to bypass the lock screen altogether for some extra convenience.

Conclusion

The Acer Iconia One 7 has a great specification and fast internals, but its build quality is so sub-par that we simply can't recommend it. It also has a smaller, less detailed screen than its rivals and its battery life is one of the worst we've seen from this size of tablet. The Tesco Hudl 2 may not have bundles of stamina either, but its larger, sharper display, superior build quality and more user-friendly interface put it streets ahead of the Iconia One 7, especially when it's exactly the same price (or less if you have points on your Tesco Clubcard). 

If neither of those suit your needs, then check out our regularly-updated Best tablets 2015 and buying guide.