Acer Iconia One 7

Acer Iconia One 7, the latest 7-inch budget tablet with Android from Acer underwent FCC filings this week, meaning that it will come to the US as well in Q2.

(UPDATE, April 29: Acer Iconia One 7 Unveiled – Release In June
UPDATE, April 25: Acer Iconia One 7 B1-730 Leak Ahead Of Unveiling)

The tablet remains unofficial, but leaks are here and there, including from Acer itself, and FCC approvals are always good indicators of course. By the looks of it, this could be the first tablet from Acer since they stopped making these tablets themselves, and instead bought in OEM’s from Shanghai Huaqin in China.

What’s noteworthy about Acer Iconia One 7 wouldn’t be the specs, but the price. Could this become another sub-$100 tablet? The MSRP from Taiwan is 3,490 Taiwanese dollars, which equates to 115 US dollars. But that’s not to say $115 will become the price for the US market, it could become even cheaper.

Acer Iconia One 7
Acer Iconia One 7 in Acer’s own poster

The question then is if it’s worth the money, since Acer already launched a new 7-inch budget tablet with the Acer B1-720 in February, a tablet which had a MSRP of $129.

But the specs reveal what the Acer One 7 is worth. The Acer Iconia One 7 runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean out of the box, and I don’t know how quickly it will upgrade. It’s powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 (WM8880) processor, but it has 1GB of DDR3 RAM though. Flash memory size is 16GB at this price with 32GB microSD support. The resolution on the 7-inch display is only 1024 x 600, with 5-finger touch support.

It has dual cameras, but the front camera is a tiny 0.3 MP camera, while the rear camera is a 1.9 MP camera.
The weight is 289 grams, while the thickness is 9.9 mm.

But then there’s the battery. It only has a capacity of 3000mAh and Acer claims this can squeeze out 3.5 hours of video playback time. And when we consider that video playback time consumes less battery than web browsing with the Wi-Fi on, this could mean that web browsing could be limited to under 3 hours.

This is strange behavior from Acer, and one that they’ve been applying for 2 years now to their budget tablets. Which might explain why the new Acer B1-720 is just sitting on the shelves, unloved, while budget tablets with higher specs from Asus and others sell quite well at around the $120 mark.

The design is pretty good, but with the poor specs and plenty of good alternative tablets from its competition, this is a tablet blooper in my opinion. As always in this tablet segment, the Asus MeMO Pad HD 7 has it beaten.

Acer Iconia One 7
Acer Iconia One 7
Acer Iconia One 7 rear
Acer Iconia One 7 rear

– Tom Bowen