Acer Iconia Tab A210 review

Jelly Bean-toting 10.1-inch tablet with a great value spec - and a USB 2.0 slot

Acer Iconia Tab A210
It might be built for value, but there more than the price to recommend the Tab A210

TechRadar Verdict

The Acer Iconia A210 is one of the best budget 10-inch tablets available. If it wasn't for the very average battery life, we'd be having a major fling with the A210 because it has both flexibility and an Acer-made polish to its user interface that we really enjoyed using.

Pros

  • +

    USB 2.0 slot

  • +

    microSD card

  • +

    Acer Ring

  • +

    Good value

Cons

  • -

    Lacks HDMI output

  • -

    Data-only microUSB

  • -

    No rear camera

  • -

    Average screen

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Although it's still the iPad and, to some extent Samsung's Galaxy lineup of tablets that grab the headlines, the future looks brightest for good value 10-inch tablets. The Google Nexus is perhaps the front runner for now, but Acer's Iconia A210 - a 10.1-inch tablet recently upgraded and now running an updated Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS - is a great value effort that deserves a second look.

As well as some half-decent speakers, the A210 comes with a very handy USB slot - something that will make life very easy for those who download a lot of video. Who needs complicated cloud-based apps and home networking antics when a USB slot will do the same jobs faster and more reliably?

Acer Iconia Tab A210

There are sacrifices to meet the price, but they're generally wisely made

Shipping with 16GB of storage (an 8GB version is also available), the A210 also has a microSD card slot - though it's hidden from view - and a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution IPS LCD screen that's just hi-res enough to show HD footage. Still, with even seven-inch tablets like the Google Nexus 7 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 having the same resolution despite being many times smaller in terms of screen real estate, that must be judged poor value.

Jamie Carter

Jamie is a freelance tech, travel and space journalist based in the UK. He’s been writing regularly for Techradar since it was launched in 2008 and also writes regularly for Forbes, The Telegraph, the South China Morning Post, Sky & Telescope and the Sky At Night magazine as well as other Future titles T3, Digital Camera World, All About Space and Space.com. He also edits two of his own websites, TravGear.com and WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com that reflect his obsession with travel gear and solar eclipse travel. He is the author of A Stargazing Program For Beginners (Springer, 2015),