Acer Iconia A1 review

Budget Android tablet looks solid but unexceptional

acer iconia a1
It's very... Nexus 7

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Despite Touch WakeUp automatically opening the camera app when the Acer Iconia A1's screen is thumbed, photography is not this camera's strong suit.

Nor should it be, perhaps, but it's best you know that the front-facing camera's whopping (joke) 0.3-megapixel skills are just about acceptable for some grainy, noisy video calls.

Acer Iconia A1-810 review

Ditto the flash-free, focus-free main camera on the back of the tablet, whose five megapixel images are ruined by dull colours, blur and blocky blacks that lack detail within. However, having dual cameras is relatively rare on tablets this size - and the panoramic feature is useful if you take things slowly.

Video is recorded in 720p resolution at 30fps, but the resulting files (which have a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels in the MP4 format) are soft, grainy and blurred on any kind of movement. It's HD in name only.

Acer Iconia A1-810 review

Photos can be inspected within the standard Gallery app, or through Acer's own Astro file manager. The latter gathers up photos from a variety of sources - cloud, network and inserted microSD card - as thumbnails, opening them with Astro Image Viewer.

It's more functional than Gallery, with better transitions during slideshows, though the carousel of thumbnails across the bottom does take a while to load.

Acer Iconia A1-810 review

Click here to see the full resolution image

Even a 5MP shot lacks detail, with visible blocking.

Acer Iconia A1-810 review

Click here to see the full resolution image

Using the Acer Iconia A1's digital zoom is a no-no.

Acer Iconia A1-810 review

Click here to see the full resolution image

Colour and contrast are good, but edge definition and detail are not.

Acer Iconia A1-810 review

Click here to see the full resolution image

Images from the Acer Iconia A1's camera can very easily be washed out.

Acer Iconia A1-810 review

Click here to see the full resolution image

Close-ups look blurry and colours aren't well saturated.

Acer Iconia A1-810 review

Click here to see the full resolution image

Panoramic shots must be performed very slowly. Rendering takes 20 seconds and flattens the image, but with some banding.

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),