Acer Iconia One 10 (2017) review

It's surprising how much gadget you can get for just $150. For instance, you can pick up a 10.1-inch Android tablet, the Acer Iconia One 10, which offers solid battery life and useful apps for multitasking. However, you will have to temper your performance expectations for devices at this price.

Design

The textured and patterned white shell, small silver speakers and white bezel lend the Acer Iconia One 10 an unremarkable design. The back tapers in on the sides, which causes the rear camera's lens to stick out. With a plastic shell that bends when you grip it and a display that constantly attracts fingerprints, this tablet looks and feels cheap.

A headphone jack and a micro-USB port sit on the left edge, and the tablet's microSD card slot and buttons for power and volume rest on its top edge. The 2-megapixel front camera lives slightly right of center in the bezel above the display.

Weighing 1.23 pounds and measuring 0.4 inches thick, the Iconia One 10 is heavier and thicker than the Amazon Fire HD 10 (0.95 pounds, 0.3 inches) and the Lenovo Tab A2 10 (1.1 pounds, 0.35 inches). All three tablets have 10.1-inch displays.

Display

The Iconia One 10's display (1280 x 800 pixels) is fairly colorful but not very bright, and has a lower resolution than competing slates. The tablet did a good job of rendering accurate skin tones for Chris Evans and Anthony Mackie in the trailer for Captain America: Civil War. Unfortunately, pixilation made it difficult to make out the circular grain on Captain America's shield and the fabric of Tony Stark's suit. The $180 Lenovo Tab 2 A10 offers a higher, 1920 x 1080 (full-HD) resolution.

The Iconia One 10 allows a wide range of viewing angles (from 75 degrees on both sides), but its heavily reflective Gorilla Glass 4 display picked up a lot of glare in our well-lit office.

When tested with our light meter, the display registered 266 nits of brightness, which is fine for browsing the Web and watching videos on YouTube indoors. However, panels on the Fire HD 10 (370 nits), Tab 2 A10 (380 nits) and the average tablet (367 nits) shine much brighter.

The Iconia One 10's display reproduces 81.1 percent of the sRGB color gamut, according to our colorimeter. That is close to what we saw with the Fire HD 10 (82.7 percent), but less than the scores for both the average tablet (92.4 percent) and the Tab 2 A10 (94 percent).