Acer Iconia One 7 B1-750 review

Camera

On the back you’ll find a 5-megapixel camera. Although fine detail was in short supply in our outdoor photos, colours were still bright and accurate and noise was kept to a minimum. We did notice quite a lot of rainbow speckle in large areas of cloud, though, and the sheer number of blurred, fuzzy pixels means you probably won’t want to use the camera for capturing important family moments. There’s also an HDR mode, but this didn’t really improve matters. Likewise, our indoor shots were even hazier, showing lots of blurry outlines and muddied areas of detail.

^ We don’t expect 5-megapixel cameras to capture areas of minute detail, but we noticed a fair amount of rainbow speckle in larger areas of solid colour

If you’re happy with just uploading basic snaps to social networks, though, the Iconia One 7 has plenty of fun photo modes that let you be a bit more creative with your snaps. You get a choice of four filters, various different types of collage shots, white balance controls and six camera modes, including panorama, night and landscape. The menu options are quite fiddly, though, as the mode wheel can be a little unresponsive at times and trying to tap the side menu often brings up the notifications bar instead.

^ The Iconia One 7’s camera has plenty of different camera modes, but the quality of our indoor shots was even worse than those we took outdoors

Android

We also wish Acer didn’t load its tablets with so many pre-installed apps and widgets, as they not only take up space on the Iconia One 7’s already precious amount of storage space, but they also clog up your app tray with several unnecessary icons. For instance, the Iconia One 7 comes with 16GB of storage, but the sheer amount of bloatware takes up 1.1GB. Minus the space taken up by its Android 4.4.4 operating system, this leaves you with just 9.6GB for your own apps and files. Fortunately, the microSD card slot on the side of the tablet allows you to expand this up to 32GB.

That said, Acer has done very little to the overall appearance of Android, so at least you won’t have to contend with fussy menu layouts or weirdly placed apps. You’ll still need to remember to swipe down from the top-right for settings and the top left for notifications, but otherwise this stock version of Android is very easy and simple to use. We particularly like Acer’s Double Tap feature, which you can use to wake the tablet from sleep mode, and you can even allow the tap to bypass the lock screen altogether for some extra convenience.

Conclusion

The Acer Iconia One 7 has a great specification and fast internals, but its build quality is so sub-par that we simply can’t recommend it. It also has a smaller, less detailed screen than its rivals and its battery life is one of the worst we’ve seen from this size of tablet. The Tesco Hudl 2 may not have bundles of stamina either, but its larger, sharper display, superior build quality and more user-friendly interface put it streets ahead of the Iconia One 7, especially when it’s exactly the same price (or less if you have points on your Tesco Clubcard). 

If neither of those suit your needs, then check out our regularly-updated Best tablets 2015 and buying guide.