Acer Iconia Tab A700 review

We first saw the (then unnamed) Acer Iconia Tab A700 back at CES in January. Acer’s announcement of a Full HD tablet was pretty impressive stuff at the time, and despite a fairly lengthy wait to get our hands on a review model, it’s still a big selling point today. The new iPad may have shot past the HD mark with its 2,048×1,536 resolution, but the A700’s 1,920×1,200 screen (slightly higher than Full HD) is still a big deal. Just as impressive, though, is that the tablet is no more expensive than many recent, lower-resolution, Android devices.

The Full HD display is the big selling point here, and it certainly impresses

The screen is a 16:10 widescreen aspect ratio, making it better for watching movies than the iPad’s squarer shaped display. No video scaling is required here, with a typical HD movie fitting the screen almost perfectly, leaving just 60 lines of pixels spare above and below the film – around a 1/4in on this display. With a pixel density of 224 pixels-per-inch (PPI), it’s not far off the iPad’s 264PPI, so in general use you never notice any pixellation. There is the problem of apps that can’t handle the high resolution, which we’ll come to later.

Here’s a pixel-to-pixel grab of the icons a the bottom of the home screen – click to enlarge

Putting the resolution aside, and looking at image quality as a whole, we were pretty impressed. Acer described the screen to us as “IPS quality” back in January, and it certainly doesn’t look far off. The viewing angles aren’t quite there, and the contrast looks to be a touch off the best we’ve seen, but colours are punchy and it’s plenty bright enough. We do despair a little at the incredibly glossy display – on a bright day in our office it was hard to make out the screen for the reflections, so this may not be the best tablet to use when you’re out and about.

We did have a couple more screen-related niggles. Occasionally we found the screen dimming as we read content in portrait orientation. We eventually worked out that our hand was blocking one of the light sensors, which then thought we were sitting in the dark and so dropped the screen brightness. We’re guessing that the display bases the brightness on an average of multiple sensors, and it would seem more logical that if the tablet senses one sensor is totally dark, it should presume it’s covered and trust the reading from the other sensor. In addition, occasionally we found the screen failed to register an input. We’ve used a lot of Android devices and touchscreens don’t always register poorly-placed jabs or those which barely contact the screen, but these were definite and on target, but then ignored. It’s only maybe one press in twenty or fifty, but it did annoy us.

The orientation lock and volume rocker are nicely engineered

Physically speaking, the A700 is a fairly typical Android tablet. At 11mm thick it’s not going to win any awards for slenderness, but then it’s hardly chunky either. Most of the tablet is covered in a lightly-rubberised, textured finish – which makes it easy to keep hold of. The volume rocker looks better than most and the little dots on it help you tell up from down – once you get used to the fact that up/down are reversed in portrait mode. Next to this is a lock orientation button, handy for reading in bed – auto screen orientation sensors tend to get confused when a tablet is held horizontally. An HDMI output means you can watch videos, or play games, on a big screen.

Under a small flap on the side is a microSD card slot with support for up to 32GB SDHC cards. This allows for plenty of expansion over and above the generous 32GB of built-in memory. With this tablet designed to make the best of HD video, all this storage capacity is appreciated. Also here is a blanked off slot for a 3G SIM card – the upcoming A701 will have 3G capability.

If storage is an issue for you, then add another 32GB via microSD for just £13 from Amazon, that’s then a 64GB tablet for around £160 less than the equivalent iPad

There are stereo speakers on the lower edge of the tablet, which are acceptable for watching YouTube videos, catch-up TV, or streaming talk radio – anything where you want to hear what’s going on, but aren’t too bothered by audio quality. The Dolby Digital Plus logo in between the speakers shows there’s support for Dolby’s preferred audio format on mobile devices – read more on this here.

The stereo speakers are better than most tablet efforts

Also on the bottom of the tablet is the Micro USB port, which is also designed to take the included charger’s proprietary cable. This provides 12V at 1.5A, allowing the tablet to charge far quicker than over standard USB. In our battery tests the A700 managed an impressive nine hours and 34 minutes of continuous video playback using our standard-definition H.264 test file. Switching to a HD video file gave us a score of nine hours and four minutes, so switching to HD makes hardly any difference to battery life.

Part of the reason for the tablet’s strong battery performance must be attributed to the tablet’s Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset. As well as its main quad-core processor, the now popular Tegra 3 has a fifth low-power core which takes over when you aren’t running demanding tasks. The chipset is certainly powerful. It runs at 1.3GHz and has a powerful graphics component for playing 3D games.

That said, most games can’t live up to the tablet’s resolution, with far less detail than you’d like in both the models and textures. Even the games in Nvidia’s own Tegra zone, which are better than most, suffer from this to some degree. The problem extends into other apps too, Android doesn’t have the best selection of tablet-friendly apps designed to work at higher resolutions, and this push to Full HD just further compounds that issue.

Even good-looking games, like Real Racing 2, can’t stand up to the scrutiny of Full HD – this is a pixel-to-pixel screenshot, click to enlarge

The A700’s main competition is the ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity 700, which also has a 10.1in display with a 1,920×1,200 resolution, will come with with a keyboard dock and has a super-bright IPS+ branded display and a metal chassis – but is rumoured to be launching imminently in the US for just $499, which would only make it around £50 more than the A700. That said, the A700’s price should drop as more retailers get stock; we’d expect there to be a bigger price difference between the tablets in a few months. We’ll have a full review of the Infinity 700 next week, as soon as we get some actual retail pricing for the UK.

The A700 is pretty impressive, but we want to see the competition first

If you’re buying a tablet today to watch a variety of video content, then the A700 is the best 10in device to buy. It has advantages over the higher-resolution iPad, including a more movie-friendly aspect ratio and 32GB of memory with expansion potential. Android also provides a wide selection of media players from the Google Play store, plus easy drag-and-drop media file transfers from a PC and no messing around with iTunes. The A700 is also reasonably priced, but handful of niggles hold it back from a top score.