Acer Predator 8 review – the Nvidia Shield Tablet rival

While many tablets can be accused of looking rather similar, the same claim can’t be levelled at the Acer Predator 8. The Android gaming tablet’s distinctive red ‘quad-speakers’ ensure it stands out from the crowd. Whether or not that’s a good thing will be down to personal taste but at least you can’t accuse it of being boring.

Like Acer’s Predator range of gaming PCs and laptops, the Predator 8 has a ‘hyper-aggressive’ design that plays to the stereotypical (but not necessarily the genuine) tastes of gamers. There’s flashes of red contrasting with the predominantly silver and black case and the back has a faux-brushed metal finish. It feels solid and well-constructed in your hands. At 8.7mm thick and 350g it’s reasonably thin and light.

When held in landscape, there are soft grip rubberised pads on either end, designed to give you a firmer hold of the tablet during intense gaming sessions. In reality, these are compromised by the shape of the speakers. These jut out at awkward angles and have sharp, uncomfortable corners meaning there’s a good chance they dig into your hands.

I’m assuming Acer’s plan was for you to hold the tablet with your palms between each vertical pair of speakers, but in practice doing so puts your thumbs above where most games would place onscreen controls such as virtual D-Pads. This means you’re far more likely to hold the tablet lower down, wherein the sharp corners become a problem and you’re less able to actually use the soft grip pads.

This could well depend on the size of your hands and preferred gripping style, but either way there’s really no reason that Acer had to make the corners quite so sharp. It would have been better if the corners were rounded off.

Quadio Speakers

Acer calls those distinctive, red speakers ‘Predator Quadio’ as there are four of them. These detect the orientation of the tablet, meaning you get correct left and right stereo channels regardless of whether the tablet is held in portrait or landscape, which is great. This also affects the volume rocker controls so they match the orientation so things don’t get confusing.

The front-facing speakers are some of the loudest I’ve heard from a tablet and there is genuine, pleasing stereo separation. There’s virtual surround from Dolby but the effect isn’t particularly prominent. You can hear a slight pause in the audio when you change the tablet’s orientation as it adapts the speaker configuration to match. The pause is no longer than it takes for Android’s screen rotation animation to complete so it doesn’t feel too jarring.

There’s very little in the way of any bass presence when using the Standard sound profile, but the mids and trebles are surprisingly crisp. It meant the tablet was great for watching televisions shows and films in terms of being able to hear dialogue without the need for headphones. Using the Acer MediaMaster app, you can change the audio to Rich or Focussed. Set to the latter there’s a considerably warmer sound, which was my preferred mode.

Aside from the sharpness of the edge of the speakers, I had another complaint when it came to their design. The speaker grilles have tiny perforations and these have a habit of collecting dust that becomes trapped and difficult to clean.

Display

The Predator 8’s 8in display is particularly lovely. It has a 1,920×1,200 display that’s particularly vibrant and bright. It has 100% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut, making for wonderfully accurate colours and its peak brightness of 411.1cd/m2 makes it consummately easy to use even in bright outdoor lighting.

Black levels of 0.43cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 949:1 aren’t great and under close scrutiny the blacks aren’t as deep as I would like but they be partially excused for such excellent brightness and colour vibrancy. Colours really do pop off the screen. While it’s not a super high-resolution panel for its size, text and images still look decently crisp and sharp. There’s no air gap between the glass and the touch panel and the backlight was nice and even with good viewing angles to boot.

If you find the colours aren’t to your taste there are a number of different profiles available in the MediaMaster app where you can adjust saturation and colour temperature.

Performance and Battery Life

The Acer Predator 8 isn’t the first Android tablet geared specifically towards gaming; the Nvidia Shield Tablet and the more recent Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 iteration both took a similar tilt. Acer, however, has used a quad-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom X7-Z8700 processor that can turbo to 2.4GHz and has integrated Intel HD Graphics.

Head-to-head with Nvidia’s Tegra K1 and Kepler SMX GPU pairing, it doesn’t quite hold up. This is first evident when comparing the two tablet’s Peacekeeper browser scores. At 1,002 it sits behind the K1’s 1,148. Similarly its Geekbench scores were eclipsed by the K1, managing 1,024 and 3,230 in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. These are compared to the Shield Tablet K1’s 1,142 and 3,554 in the same tests.

Similarly, when it came to gaming performance it fell behind, too. In our GFXBench GL Manhattan tests it managed just 1,141 (18fps) in the onscreen test and 1,171 (19fps) in the offscreen test. These are poor compared to the Kepler SMX’s performance of 1,801 (29fps) and 1,961 (32fps) in the same tests. Simply put, Intel’s processor can’t hold its own against Nvidia’s.

The Predator 8 pales where it comes to battery life, too, managing 9 hours 55 minutes to the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1’s 12 hours 39 minutes. In terms of storage, you get 32GB, which is very generous for the price. On top of that, there’s a microSD card for easy expansion although slightly annoyingly the slot is exposed on the side without a cover.

TacSense and Android Customisations

Still, when it came to how responsive Android 5.1 felt, it still felt nippy enough. Lollipop’s animations transitioned quickly and apps opened with suitable haste. Acer has packed in two haptic motors into the Predator 8, which provides some vibration feedback when tapping menus, navigating Android and using the keyboard, similar to how most Android smartphones perform. Its real use, however, is supposed to be for gaming in order to provide some force feedback for games.

It doesn’t work with all games, however. Asphalt 8 comes pre-installed and has haptic feedback support so you can feel your nitro boosts and collisions but it doesn’t really add anything to the experience. On top of that, Asphalt 8 doesn’t play completely smoothly on the Predator 8, with occasional jerkiness, so it was a strange game to include.

In truth, I couldn’t find any other games that utilised the vibration motors, which Acer has called TacSense. High profile games you might expect to have vibration, like Dead Trigger, didn’t generate a peep out of the motors. Popular casual games like Candy Crush Saga, which might have benefitted from a little extra excitement, likewise didn’t generate any feedback. The vibration motors, then, only felt useful for the nice level of feedback from the onscreen keyboard that I often missed transitioning from an Android smartphone to a tablet.

One annoyance is the amount of pre-installed apps and shortcuts to app installations that come with the Predator 8. You have a suite of Acer apps as part of the Iconia Suite and Acer BYOC apps for music and photos. Then there are third party apps like the Amazon Appstore and Booking.com. To top it all off there are shortcuts to install a number of games. They’re not pre-installed and will take you to the Play store to install, but they’re still annoying to have to remove.

There are some useful inclusions, however. EZ Tasking is Acer’s take on multitasking in Android and lets you run two apps side-by-side, with each app resizable, Not all apps are compatible, but the more obvious ones are such as the Gmail, Chrome, YouTube and Hangouts apps. This means you can have a YouTube video playing and fire up a second app without it stopping (or having to have a YouTube Music Key subscription for background playback).

You can even have the other app fullscreen and trick it into continuing to play by dragging the adjustable slider all the way across and choosing that the YouTube app doesn’t actually close and continues playing in the background. Other features return from other Acer tablets including ways to wake it up from sleep with five-finger or two-thumb gestures or capture screenshots with three-finger pinches.

Camera

There’s a 5 megapixel camera on the back with a 2 megapixel front-facing camera. Neither camera is particularly good, however. The rear camera takes a long time to autofocus and produces very noisy, disappointing images that appear soft and lacking in vibrancy. Holding the tablet in landscape also leads to accidentally covering the lens all too often as well.

Conclusion

The Acer Predator 8 does a lot of things well. It’s a good size and weight and feels well made. Its front-facing speakers and display are particularly excellent, making it a great tablet for watching video. As a specific gaming tablet, however, it comes up short. There’s not much there specifically geared towards gamers. The haptic feedback is under-utilised. It has double the storage for the same price as the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 but its actual gaming performance can’t hold a candle.

The Shield Tablet, aside from better performance, also has lots of gamer-friendly additions such as integrated Twitch streaming, controller support and Nvidia’s game streaming options such as GeForce Now and GameStream for your PC (if you have a compatible Nvidia GPU). In the end, the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 is the much better buy even if the Acer Predator 8 is still a decent tablet for the money.