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Overall we are pretty impressed with what the Acer Iconia A1-810 has to offer. Let's be clear, this tablet is designed to offer great value for money and isn't comparable to a lot of tablets on the market such as the iPad Mini in terms of specification because it's around £100 cheaper.
One of the key differentiating factors of this tablet is the 7.9″ screen which is larger than most of the competition. It's not quite as cut and dry as being larger in size, though, as it features a different aspect ratio to most tablets. The 4:3 aspect ratio of the Iconia A1 means that it isn't actually any better for playing video than a 7″ tablet because all of the gained size is in width (with the tablet orientated vertically). The extra space does come in useful in other applications, though.
We were impressed with the performance of the Iconia A1 considering the low-end specification as it was able to handle a number of fairly demanding games like Temple Runner 2 without issue. Unsurprisingly, it does struggle a little in more demanding titles.
From a software point of view, there isn't really much to talk about as the Iconia A1 runs as close to a vanilla version of Android you're likely to find on a tablet these days. The only notable additions are ‘Touch WakeApp' which lets you bypass the lock screen and launch applications with different screen gestures and ‘Acer Cloud' which gives you access to free cloud storage for your files provided you sign up to an Acer account.
The main selling point of the Acer Iconia A1-810 is it's price. At around £160 from Pixmania for the 16 GB version, we feel it offers excellent value for money as there isn't much competition at this price point without compromising with 8 GB of capacity or a dated version of Android (or both). The RRP of the 8 GB version of the tablet is £150, but we couldn't find it available for sale at the time of writing. At this price, we would be inclined to opt for the 16 GB anyway as a £10 premium for double the memory capacity is great value.
Pros
- Great value.
- Larger screen than competition.
- Latest version of Android.
- Decent battery life.
- Pre-installed apps are very useful.
- 16 GB of inbuilt memory.
Cons
- the screen isn't impressive.
KitGuru says: The Iconia A1 is a great option for those people looking for a competitively priced low-end tablet and we're willing to forgive the less than perfect screen considering the price point!
