Acer Iconia Tab A700 review

Apple’s iPad blazed a trail with its high resolution Retina display, and now its Android rivals are attempting to follow suit. The Asus Transformer Pad Infinity 700 was the first to go Full HD, but Acer’s Iconia Tab A700 is hot on its heels – and unlike its wallet-busting rival, it costs a mere £363.

The Iconia Tab A700 stretches that resolution across a 10in display. Acer describes the display as “IPS quality” – it hasn’t been able to confirm exactly which panel technology is in use – but the results are stunning. The Iconia A700 has the wide viewing angles we’ve come to expect from tablets with IPS panels, and colours are bold and accurate throughout.

The native resolution is actually 1,920 x 1,200, which makes for a tightly-packed pixel density of 224ppi. That can’t quite match the 264ppi of the iPad, but gives crisp text and images, and pixels can barely be seen, even close-up. The maximum brightness of 333cd/m[sup]2[/sup] is perfectly acceptable for most situations, even if it’s some way behind the scorching Super IPS+ mode of the Asus.

At 11mm thick and 649g it’s a little bulkier than most top-end tablets, and the rear is constructed from plastic. Still, despite a little flex, the Acer feels solid and sturdy enough to last the course.

Acer has fitted the Iconia A700 with Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chipset, but it’s the T30S model running at 1.3GHz rather than the 1.4GHz T33 used in the Asus. The lower clock speed provides performance that’s respectable rather than outstanding: in Quadrant the Acer scored 3,284 to the Infinity’s 4,941, and it’s also a little slower than the Asus Transformer Pad 300, which scored 4,037.

The pattern was repeated in SunSpider: the Acer’s 2,794ms is nothing to be ashamed of, but it can’t match the 2,008ms of the Transformer Pad 300.