Acer Iconia Tab A210 review

While the interface is regular Jelly Bean, the A210 does have a layer of - for once - genuinely useful Acer-made apps and ideas. The most noticeable is the lock screen, which features the usual swipe-to-unlock gesture. However, as you swipe to the right, four shortcuts - in this case to Gmail, Browser, Gallery and Google - appear as four segments of half a circle. Our only issue is that you have to double-back while swiping to choose one of them, but in practice it works fine.

There's also the Acer Ring, a four-pronged dial that pops up over whatever screen you're looking at when you press the yellow 'ring' in the centre of the screen's lower edge. When activated, the transparent ring makes the background blurry, and presents four shortcuts to whatever you want (by default they link to Gallery, Browser, Screenshot and Settings) around a Search shortcut, with a volume control on one side and links to recently visited web pages on the others, as preview-style tabs. Acer Ring is well executed, useful and nicely designed.

The A210's IPS LCD panel is just sensitive enough for general navigation, and is also absolutely fine for watching video. The viewing angle is good, colours are reasonable (there's the usual lack of contrast, but that's LCD for you) and certainly detailed enough for everyday viewing. Any lower res, mind, and we would have serious reservations - it's right on the limit.

The A210's reasonably fast processor also ensures that apps are launched quickly and multi-tasking is a breeze - in ten days of testing we only had one freeze-up and very few delays.