Acer attacks sub-£100 tablet market

We all knew it would happen, but we just weren't sure when. The price battle surrounding ‘serious/sensible tablets' looks to be well and truly underway – with former world heavyweight champ, Acer, leading a new charge. KitGuru scans for bargains in its inbox.

Using the ever more popular 7″ format, Acer engineers have been working on a challenging task: How to pack a 1.2GHz A9 Cortex dual core processor, 512MB of RAM with 8GB of MultiMedia Card storage (eMMC) and a 5 hour battery into a device which runs Android Jelly Bean (Chromed to the hilt) – but available to end users for less than £100. Oh, and it can't weigh much more than 300 grams.

With the Acer Iconia B1, they appear to have succeeded.

The cute device also has a front facing camera which, at 300,000 pixels resolution, is not going to set records for clarity – but it will enable multi-user video calls.

The Android-style Google-i-fi-cation means 700,000 apps etc are all ready for you to access – and it has a special ‘grippy plastic' bit in one corner which, we're told, makes it easier for kids to hang on to.

At £99, some corners will have been cut. But at £99, could you really ask for more?  While the initial customer reviews are not quite as positive as they were for the Nexus 7 from Asus – this device is something like £60 cheaper – so it's hard not to think of it as a complete bargain.

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KitGuru says: Go back 2 short years and the kind or tablet you could buy around the £100 mark included the dubious DISGO, which used Android 2.1 – so it could not even play Flash videos from YouTube etc. While Samsung and Apple do battle in the £300 and over space – Acer and its competitors are opening new markets further down the price chain. We like ‘accessibility' – so good luck to them.

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