The Acer Iconia Tab P11 isn’t available in the UK – buy these instead

Update: The Acer Iconia Tab P11 currently does not have a UK release date. If you’d like to simply skip to the part where I recommend what you should buy instead, feel free to click here to jump to my verdict. Otherwise, read on to see why I wouldn’t recommend the Acer Iconia Tab P11 even if you could buy it today.

Original review follows:

For the most part, the tablet market is dominated by two names; Apple at the higher-end, and Amazon on the budget side of things. It’s the latter arena in which the Acer Iconia Tab P11 is debuting, attempting to wrestle some attention away from the retail giant’s horde of affordable tablets.

While it has some decent ammo to help it in this fight – not least of which is a vastly superior software experience compared to Amazon’s tired and outdated launcher – there’s simply not much here that isn’t done better by other tablets around this price. With several Android options out there offering better performance, battery life, build quality and displays, and the entry-level iPad looming over all of them, the Acer Iconia Tab P11 simply cannot compete.

Acer Iconia Tab P11 review: What do you get for the money?

Retailing for £249, the Acer Iconia Tab P11 sits alongside the likes of Amazon’s Fire Max 11 (£250) and the Oppo Pad Air (£239). Not much higher up the ladder, we’ve also got the recent Honor Pad 9 (£280) and the 9th generation Apple iPad 10.2in (£300). That’s some very stiff competition.

So how does the Acer stack up? Starting with the build, the Iconia Tab P11 is an aluminium tablet measuring 265 x 8.1 x 170mm and weighing 550g. That’s marginally lighter than the 12in Honor Pad 9 but a fair bit heavier than the Fire Max 11 (490g), the iPad 10.2in (487g) and the Oppo Pad Air (440g). The Iconia Tab P11 is also the thickest of the bunch, with the Amazon and Apple models both sitting at 7.5mm and the Honor and Oppo even skinnier at 6.9mm apiece.

The display is an 11in quantum dot IPS panel with a crisp 2,000 x 1,200 resolution and a solid enough 90Hz refresh rate. A mediocre 5MP selfie camera sits on one of the long edges, nestled in the chunky bezel, with its opposing 13MP number tucked away in a corner-set housing on the rear. Both get the job done for video calls but don’t expect much in the way of photography.

The Iconia Tab P11 is powered by an octa-core 2.2GHz Mediatek MT8781 chipset, backed up by 8GB of RAM and a roomy 256GB of onboard storage space. The latter can be expanded by a further 512GB thanks to the microSD card slot. On the power front, there’s an 8,000mAh battery which can be juiced up via the 20W charger bundled in the box.

That microSD card slot is joined on the right-hand edge (with the tablet in landscape orientation) by the USB-C port and two of the quad-speakers, with the opposing duo in matching positions on the left edge. The top edge has the power and volume keys tucked off to the left, while on the top-right corner, there’s a peculiarly placed 3.5mm headphone jack. I don’t hate the positioning, and it doesn’t make use any easier or more difficult, so let’s just chalk this one up as a design quirk.

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Acer Iconia Tab P11 review: What did we like about it?

I’d normally cover the software in the above section, but as it’s easily one of the Iconia Tab P11’s biggest strengths, I’ll use it to kick off the positives, instead. The tablet runs Android 14 out of the box and for the most part, the launcher is clean and simple, with user-friendly layouts and only a handful of irritating preinstalled apps. I’m not completely sold on the navigation buttons being shunted off to the right to make room for the quick-launch dock but that’s a relatively minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things.

The software is also well-optimised for the tablet’s intended usage as a media device. A quick swipe to the right from the homescreen will take you to the dedicated entertainment space, which groups together all of your streaming apps, games, audio and books, similar to a smart TV’s homepage. I’m a big fan of the setup and appreciated having all of my recommendations from various apps grouped in one place.

As for how things look while streaming, I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, as I’ll have more to say in the next section. For now, I’ll just highlight the contrast and black levels, both of which measured better than I expected, at 1,282:1 and 0.24cd/m2, respectively. There’s also no denying that the quantum dot display nails the vibrancy that it’s aiming for; a terrific 99.9% of the sRGB gamut is covered here and colours are pleasingly punchy.

The quad-speakers put out fairly thin audio that’s light on bass, but for this price, it’s a solid enough effort. I watched Godzilla Minus One on Netflix with the volume at maximum and the dialogue was reasonably clear, while the falling buildings and stomping footsteps had a decent amount of weight to them. Things got a little distorted when a lot was happening at once – screams, gunfire, shrieking and falling debris all bleeding into one – but I wouldn’t expect much more than this from a budget tablet.

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Acer Iconia Tab P11 review: What could be improved?

Unfortunately, that’s about all the good things I have to say about the Iconia Tab P11. The first issue that came up was that the tablet didn’t always feel particularly robust during testing. Despite being primarily composed of aluminium, the Iconia Tab P11 had a habit of creaking slightly every time I handled it. Nothing ever actually cracked or sprang loose but it didn’t give me much confidence in the tablet’s build quality.

The display issues I hinted at earlier are more of a concern. For starters, it doesn’t get very bright, hitting a mediocre peak of 314cd/m2 in my testing and going no higher on adaptive brightness. There’s also only one colour profile and, while it’s punchy, the accuracy is far from perfect; using a colorimeter, I measured an average Delta E colour variance score of 3.44, which is quite far from the target value of one.

I wasn’t thrilled with the results of my performance tests, either. In the Geekbench 5 benchmarks, the Acer Iconia Tab P11 only outperformed the Oppo Pad Air, with the identically priced Amazon Fire Max 11 pulling 31% ahead in the single-core portion and 17% in the multi-core. Meanwhile, both the Apple iPad (2021) and Honor Pad 9 show the kind of performance boosts you can get for only a little more money.

Things are murkier in the GFXBench tests for graphics rendering. The Amazon Fire Max 11 wouldn’t run the software, so I don’t have results for that one, but the iPad is far and away the best choice here. The Acer managed to match the Honor Pad 9 in the on-screen portion, only falling behind in the off-screen. Its results still aren’t particularly good, however, and point to a device more suited to Candy Crush than Fortnite.

Finally, the battery life is also quite disappointing. The results of 12hrs 13mins is a little under the 13 hours touted by Acer and the lowest of the aforementioned selection of tablets. It’s not far behind the Honor Pad 9 but it’s worth remembering that the latter does have a slightly larger 12in screen to illuminate.

Charging speeds are fairly atrocious, as well. After an hour on charge, the battery was only at 21% and it took close to three hours to hit 100%.

Acer Iconia Tab P11 review: Should you buy it?

Even if you abhor Amazon’s janky software and your budget doesn’t extend beyond £250, there are not a lot of reasons to choose the Acer Iconia Tab P11 over the Oppo Pad Air.  The latter has weaker performance but makes up for it with a slimmer and lighter build, a solid display and some of the best battery life you can get on a tablet of this price. Best of all, its down to just £152 at time of writing, which is nothing short of a bargain.

If you’re more interested in power than stamina, I’d point you towards either the 10.2in iPad (2021) or Honor Pad 9, depending on your preference between Android and Apple. Both offer much better performance, brighter, more colour-accurate displays and nippier charging speeds. You won’t get much more in the way of battery life but if you can push your budget just a little higher, you’ll get a lot more tablet for your money than you would from the Acer Iconia Tab P11.