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So with the Iconia B1 from Acer's hardware
I was actually really impressed so here is our Acer Iconia B1 Review
For a £99 tablet, bearing in mind
normally we don't get the best-looking screens, we don't get very bright back lights,
we don't get well milled ports, or you know,
things that are actually flush,
button placements that are a bit weird etcetera and what we actually have in
this Acer for £99 is a very well thought out bit of kit.
Obviously there's compromises, there always hasto be as you drop the price point.
Plastic screen for instance. The screen is slightly recessed and because of the
plastic screen on here, it
is quite reflective so you will find that
direct sunlight is bit of a problem
but the backlight is reasonable enough to compensate although it's again is not
the brightest out there but it does the job.
Your buttons are on the side here.
You've got your power button,
volume rockers
and a noise canceller.
On the bottom here
you've got the SD card slot and a USB jack and
that's your speaker there. Now the speaker itself I found it to be a
little bit on the tinny side.
It kind of vibrates a little bit when you're playing games at reasonably high volume
which, fair enough,
it is quite a small speaker grille.
This finishing round the outside, this blue colour,
actually is ok and it doesn't look too silly and it doesn't stand out too much
although review
this thing on the corner here, this Iconia badge
I could do without that frankly, I think it's just a sticky label you could
peel that off if you wanted to.
The .3megapixel camera on the front, it's not brilliant but again
are you really buying this to take photographs with? No you're not, it'a a
media device at the end of the day.
One thing I did find which is very common to these lower-priced tablets
is
not sure if you can hear that
but just some give and flex in the plastic.
And whilst it's not too bad,
it's a little bit irritating
when you're playing a game and it kind of feels like the unit's flexing a little bit. but again,
it's completely made of plastic and it's £99. I can
forgive an awful lot
when
as you're going to see, coming up, this thing absolutely smokes the competition.
Hi everyone, so here we are with the Acer Iconia B1
an 8gig wifi enabled
Android tablet review.
Now this particular tablet is rather special.
It's £99 at retail
so you can walk into a shop today and buy this today for £99 and do you know
what's even better about it?
It doesn't suck!
I think Acer might have achieved something I've been going on about for
about a year now.
The point where we actually reach a £99 tablet
that you wouldn't mind giving to your grandmother
as in she's not just going to look at it and go 'why are you giving me this piece
of junk?'
The Iconia B1 is packing a media tech 1.2 GHz dual core processor
and let me tell you it's no slouch. I've been playing a few games on it and this £99
tablet Acer Iconia B1 can game.
8gig of onboard memory for storing everything on there and crucially
it does have
an SD card slot at the bottom so you can expand it. Brilliant.
There's 512 of onboard memory for actually building up your apps and
allowing them to run, and
that's not a lot
but as you're going to see
it's just about enough to play some of the latest games that have come on to the market.
Certainly I've just been playing Temple Run 2 and there's no problem.
You've got a 7inch
WSVGA TFT that's running at 1024 x 600 so you're not looking
at a high pixel density on this one, the pixels per inch,
but again it doesn't look bad in comparison to the £99 tablets we were
looking at just before Christmas
this screen is workable.
You're going to be able to use it quite nicely. It is plastic,
plastic screen and unfortunately
it picks up fingery smudges very very easily
and also it's quite reflective.
You'll be able to see here as it's being tilted back and forwards,
absolutely dead on, it's very clear and crisp
but the moment you get any sunlight there it does start to reflect quite badly.
Certainly you're going to have issues using this outdoors I would say.
At the moment this is on the highest brightness setting.
You've got a point three megapixel front facing camera.
It's pretty poor as you can imagine for a front facing camera
but it's going to be just about good enough for you doing your Skype or Google Hangout.
It does have GPS built-in which I thought was a really nice touch, wifi
80211 BG and N, Bluetooth 4
although I haven't had a chance to have a look yet and just see how much of the 4 standard is being
fully supported.
Micro SD card slot of the Acer Iconia B1 that I've mentioned and a rechargable battery. Now the
battery itself in this is on the small side,
but I think it's just about doable.
I was able to drain the battery down from about 60% in an hour and a half
doing some gaming
which you could probably say eek, but you know I was playing Grand Theft Auto
at the time
so not exactly the easiest going game out there when it comes to
pulling on your battery.
So, what are we running. Well it's running Jelly Bean which is absolutely fantastic so there's
no Ice Cream Sandwich on this.
This is running the latest version of Jelly Bean.
It's 4.1.2 so it's not the 4.2 release but I
would expect given that when I turn this on
it already had an update waiting for me from Acer it does look like they
are going to be keeping this nice and up to date.
So it has all of the standard Jelly Beanie stuff going on
that comes in 4.1.2.
You've got your home screen, you've got your Google search up at the top, you've got
access to your app
tray here.
Which I haven't actually been in to yet.
As you can see this
isn't a slouch of an interface.
It's running really really nippily on here
and yes there's some slight slowdowns in the redraw but other than that
I found that it's passable. There are tablets out there
costing twice as much that have much worse interface lag than this does.
If we just bring up the Play Store for instance
you can see
no particular slouching on that. It's not hanging around and lagging out as it's moving between
these screens it's perfectly happy.
There's some small slowdown there while it was loading the graphics and trying to scroll at the
same time but
I really can't fault it.
Let's benchmark.
So what you're seeing here basically is a fly through of the citadel level
and it's being used to calculate how many frames per second
are redrawn onto the screen of this 3D scene
and because this is an unreal engine it's not exactly the lightest weight game
engine you're going to find on on any mobile platform
and as you can see
this is gameable.
Do you know what I mean? If you're hitting around
24 to 30 frames a second, yes it might feel a little bit
laggy in places
but it's still playable. Bearing in mind also we are running this on the highest settings.
If I drop this down on to performance setting it quite happily hits about
45 frames a second,
more than comfortable for the majority of games.
For a £99 tablet, Acer you're getting a round of applause, you've done it.
First company to produce a convincing gaming laptop at £99.
As I say, this is a a very high filled scene
it does struggle quite a bit at this point
but as I say, this is on the highest settings available for this particular benchmark
so we should expect it to scream just a little bit.
There's our results... 25.6
at 1024 x 552 enhanced quality.
This is not tablet that you can kind of say, er..
I can't game on this.
You can game comfortably on this
and with a wide variety of games so
let's prove that right now.
Hi everyone. OK, here is the Acer Iconia B1, a £99 tablet
and it's about to play Need for Speed Most Wanted.
Anybody feel like taking a bet about how well it's going to do?
£99 tablet.
I'm feeling very confident.
Let's go.
And as you can see
absolutely no problem, a £99 tablet
does a very very good job at playing
Need for Speed Most Wanted.
Absolutely stunning.
The frame rate
is absolutely spot on.
Interestingly I would say yes really optimize this game for dual core processors
because this is actually working in my opinion
on par with what I'm seeing on the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, a quad core system that doesn't
really feel like it's been well optimised for this game engine.
Hello everyone, OK, here we are with Dead Trigger on the Iconia B1 by Acer.
Again, this is a £99 tablet
and it works very very well.
You're obviously not going to have the same level of graphic fidelity as you would
get from
the game running on say Tegra
the Tegra 3 system, so no water effects, no smoke or anything like that.
Basic lighting but the game is infinitely playable and the frame rate is fine,
absolutely spot on in fact.
So again another win for the Acer Iconia B1 £99 tablet.
It's now increasingly looking like you could kind of say, mmm, the Nexus 7 has
a good rival here.
Make you
kind of think
ooh, do I need to drop that extra £60
and get the Nexus 7 or
will this £99 tablet fill the void?
Certainly I think for young people
kids etcetera, where you don't want to hand them a more expensive tablet
this is absolutely the winner.
Hi everyone. OK, here's Temple Run 2 on the Acer Iconia B1.
This is a £99 tablet playing Temple Run.
As you can see
it's gloriously fast.
You really can't fault this. This is absolutely spot on,
exactly what you want from
a tablet
and a gaming tablet at that and more importantly at a price point
that frankly you could buy one of these for your kids
and not worry about it too much if they accidentally smash it to bits, it only
cost £99.
And the kids aren't going to throw it back at you saying 'I can't play games on it'.
There's some £99 tablets I've seen out there that can barely do Angry Birds
so to have something that is pushing 3D like this
fantastic.
There you go.
I mean this is one of the
latest and greatest games to come out onto the Android store
the Play Store, and it works flawlessly on a £99 tablet. There you go.
Let's have a quick look at the settings on the Acer Iconia B1.
It's all standard Jelly Bean.
So everything that you might be already aware of from Android is already here.
So your wifi and Bluetooth and data usage settings are up at the top here,
sound, display, storage, your battery and your apps.
In your apps that is where you can uninstall apps if you're not familiar with the Android
operating system, sound and display
Sound, basically how loud everything's going to be.
Also what notifications you'll have,
setup, display
as you'll see
your brightness, your wallpaper, how quickly you go to sleep and what font size you're going
to be using on your screen.
So with battery life,
it shows you how much battery life you've got left and basically how much charge
is currently on the battery and how long you've been using it for,
where those items are draining. Might as well refresh that in real time
if you like.
Location
is all about the GPS, or using the wifi assisted GPS which can also be used
to detect where you are.
You can turn those settings off in there.
If you're interested in keeping your battery life looking good
turn these items off if you're not using them.
Security is your screen lock
as well as administrator access, passwords, trusted credentials, install from SD card,
all of the features that basically keep your Android device secure.
Acer Iconia B1
You can turn those on or off.
Language and input for those people that need to switch language round or change your
keyboard, it's all in there.
Backup and reset where you can basically back up your core Google settings
and also reset the device completely as well, back to factory.
Google accounts,
So your Google account you'll always set up
when you actually turn your device on for the first time
and you've got an add account so you can add another Google account or
once you've installed some apps,Facebook Twitter and so on.
Tools are for those of us that like to get down and dirty in our Android operating
system
and we can do things like R debugging and so on.
So that's the general settings
Other than that you do have the general Google Android features going on in here, so
Google maps is present, Gmail is present
and
Google Plus is there. I think I might actually have triggered the install for that myself.
Chrome installed.
You've also got Google music, Play Store, Talk, YouTube,
subscribe.
Do subscribe if you're watching this, while I'm mentioning YouTube.
You've got your contact system in there, access to Google books, Google magazines
and Google movies.
Basically, if it's in Jelly Bean as standard it's available on the Acer Iconia when you
turn the device on for the first time.
You've also got access to the standard
Google browser
don't bother with it, get Chrome, it's brilliant.
And the current system which is like an up-to-date news magazine from Google
rounding-up all of the best news stories going on around the place.
Just a fantastic,
fantastic tablet Acer Iconia B1 Review