Acer Iconia One 8 hands-on review: Android Lollipop tablet is cheap and cheerful

8in HD tablet brings Android Lollipop on a budget
Price: £139
Rating: 0

As well as a vast range of other products, Acer has announced a budget tablet running Android 5.0 Lollipop. Here’s our Acer Iconia One 8 hands-on review.

We’re not seeing many tablets launched at the moment compared to previous years but Acer has provided us with a few new ones across Android and Windows. The new Iconia One 8 will satisfy those looking for a medium size device on a budget.

The Iconia One 8 (B1-820) will launch at just £139 which is impressively cheap putting it up against the likes of the Tesco Hudl 2 and Asus Memo Pad 7.

There’s not a great deal to say about the design and build of the Iconia One 8. Like the new Switch 10 E is has a plastic body with a nice looking and grippy textured finished made to look like fabric. The tablet will come in a large rage of colours with 10 to choose from.

It looks like most other tablets around with a reasonable bezel but not too chunky and thickness of 9.5 mm. It’s 355g and designed to be held predominantly in portrait mode.

As the name suggests, the Iconia One 8 is an 8in tablet and the IPS screen has a resolution of 1280 x 800. Brightness and viewing angles are good but we’d rather it was Full HD.

Inside is an Intel 1.8GHz Atom Z3735G quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM and performance seemed good during out hands-on time with the tablet. We’ll test it further when we get it into the lab, of course. There’s either 16- or 32GB of storage inside and a microSD card sit on the side/back so you can add more if you so wish.

Other specs are fairly basic with a 5Mp camera and the rear, VGA front camera and not much else. Acer touts a battery life of eight and a half hours.

Android 5.0 Lollipop is pre-installed and largely untouched by Acer which is a good thing but there are, as usual, the firm’s own apps built-in.

Buying Advice
There’s not much to get excited about when it comes to the Acer Iconia One 8. But this little tablet is quite good looking, very affordable and comes with almost stock Android 5.0 Lollipop making it potentially a great value purchase for those not looking for frills.