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Last month I decided to buy myself a new tablet. My initial impulse was to buy a Google Nexus 7, but, after looking around, I settled on the Acer Iconia B1-710 tablet. I shouldn’t really say “settled” since I’m happy with the B1, though I expect anyone looking for a super quality tablet would not be. I found the B1 new for $100 less than the Nexus 7. Price seems to vary from country to country, and, in the U.K., it seems to be higher than most places. If you are considering an Acer Iconia B1 and a Google Nexus 7, and they are close in price, there is no question you should buy the Google Nexus 7–it simply blows the B1 away in almost every single way.
Besides saving $100, what I like about the B1 is the performance. It is not going to play high end OpenGL games because it does not have the kind of GPU the Nexus 7 has, but its Dual Core 1.2 GHz processor is more than enough to handle most streaming video and games like Fast Racing 3D.
Variations of the B1 seem to exist, mine has 1GB of RAM, but I have seen the B1 listed with 512MB of RAM on several U.K. websites. The look is slightly different as well. Mine is black with a silver band and white on the back, while others are black with a tinge of blue (insert joke about the Nexus 7 beating it up, black and blue). Inside the box are the tablet, a USB cable, and the charger plug. The tablet uses a micro-B USB style cable, so if you lose your cable you will not pay a premium price to get a new proprietary cable.
A great feature of the tablet not found on a lot of budget tablets is the microSD expansion slot; adding a microSD card will get you up to 32GB more storage space. Unfortunately, the slot is behind a rather cheap piece of plastic on the back. It is not that the build quality feels terrible, the Iconia B1 actually feels okay in my hands, but you can tell it is not the best-built tablet. It feels a little better than a lot of the budget tablets out there, but not as good as high-end tablets.
If I could ask Acer one question about the Iconia B1, it would be “why did you bother including a front facing camera?” At 0.3mp, the front facing camera takes extremely poor pictures, worse than most webcams. There is no rear facing camera. I suppose it was included for applications like Skype, but 0.3mp, really? I wasn’t looking for a camera, so for me the lousy camera wasn’t a deal-breaker.
Lots of other reviews slag the Iconia B1 for the screen, but I found it acceptable at 1024×600. It is at least enough that I can reasonably enjoy a movie streaming from our entertainment system. High end features like an HDMI port are also missing from the B1.
My Iconia B1 came with Android 4.1.2, one of the older versions of Jelly Bean, but new enough that I really did not lack for applications. The stock set of applications was nice, Acer did not load the B1 with a ton of junk applications. And, since I use a lot of Google applications, I fell in love with all the included apps for managing Google services, particularly the contacts application which also shows recent social media activity.
The Acer Iconia B1 is not the Lamborghini of the 7” tablet world. It is more like a Chevrolet Chevelle – it has some horsepower behind it, but it is not as flashy as its Google cousin. If all you need is a basic tablet, the Acer Iconia B1 is not all that bad. It has a fairly solid body, decent CPU performance, and can be expanded with a microSD card. But, if your needs are a bit more demanding, there are much better tablets on the market. As far as budget tablets go, it is one of the best, but be aware there are a couple on the market (one with 512MB, one with 1GB), and the price is not always that far from more powerful tablets.