The Acer Iconia Tab 8 has impressive multitasking performance for its $200 price, and its premium looks and feel sets it apart from its competitors.
The tablet market has stopped growing as a whole and is flooded with Android devices of all shapes and sizes. Many still believe that there is a place for more affordable tablets, built with premium materials and with great performance. That is what the Acer Iconia Tab 8 strives for.
With a recommended retail price of only R2,900 does this aluminium clad tablet offer the bang for your buck you are hoping for?
Design and Build
The Acer Iconia Tab 8 measures 215 x 130 x 8.5 mm and weighs 360g, this device has a heft to it that feels great in the hand. It’s only available in white with an aluminum-clad body that looks and feels really nice.
This device tries to differentiate itself by offering a micro HDMI port for HDTV connection along its top edge, where you’ll also find a microphone hole, a micro USB port, and a 3.5mm audio jack. An uncovered microSD card slot interrupts the tablet’s smooth surface on the left edge, which is very easy to access.
On the right you‘ll find the power button volume rocker, with a speaker grille occupying the very bottom of the tablet’s aluminum back, and a 5MP protruding camera towards the top that is surrounded by a chrome ring. At the front you have a 2MP camera.
Overall, the device feels extremely well built and screams quality you wouldn‘t normally find in a product of this price.
Screen
The Iconia Tab 8 is one of the few tablets that has an 8-inch full HD, 1920 x 1200 pixel display. Unfortunately, video appeared slightly washed-out on the Tab 8, even when reducing the brightness to the lowest acceptable level. Side viewing angles were good, and actually helped add some depth to the colours I experienced when directly facing the display.
During our time testing the device, we did experience some issues with the responsiveness of the touch screen. For some reason, occasionally I had to press or swipe a little harder than I normally do with other touch-screen devices in order for the input to register properly. As you can imagine, this was especially frustrating when typing with the on-screen keyboard or when using swiping gestures for video navigation.
Despite our expectations, the screen on the Tab 8 doesn‘t quite measure up to its build quality. This is a real shame in our opinion, as it could have elevated this device to the top of the 8-inch pile.
Android and Performance
The Iconia Tab 8 ships with Android 4.4 KitKat and has an Acer UI which looks very much like stock Android. Don‘t think that this device is anything like one running stock, however. The tablet has a storage capacity of 16GB, but under 9GB are available, as Android 4.4 and Acer’s own UI layer takes up 6.4GB. There is also a considerable amount of non-removable bloatware that ships with the device.
You can add up to 64GB of storage with a microSD card for your files and media, but don’t count on using it for installing apps. A quad-core 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z3745 processor runs the show along with 2GB RAM. The tablet was generally snappy when performing normal day-to-day tasks and jumping between apps. Don‘t expect to do heavy gaming with this tablet though, that‘s not what it is meant for.
In different places around the UI we found some strange buggy behaviour. Whether many other experience the same problems we don‘t know, but it can get quite frustrating when you can‘t switch between apps because the multi-tasking list doesn‘t display properly.
We also noticed more buggy behaviour within apps, as the Android on-screen navigation bar (with the Home, Back, and Recent Apps buttons) wouldn’t disappear in a full-screen app when it normally should. The touch-input issues also negatively impacted the Tab 8’s overall performance, as light finger taps wouldn’t register sometimes, slowing down whatever you’re doing.
The front-facing 2-megapixel camera is fine for video calls, and the rear facing camera isn‘t anything to write home about. But as we‘ve said before, who takes photos with their tablets these days?
For our battery test, we streamed a video over Wi-Fi with Bluetooth turned off and adjusted screen brightness a couple of times ““ switching between max brightness and 50% brightness. The Iconia Tab 8’s 4,600mAh battery lasted a relatively short 4 and a half hours before needing a charge.
Conclusion
It seems like you can’t have it all when it comes to inexpensive full HD 8-inch tablets. The Acer Iconia Tab 8 has impressive multitasking performance for its $200 price (when the software works propoerly), and its premium looks and feel sets it apart from the generic plastic exteriors that you find on countless mid-range tablets on the market.
While it has good performance most of the time, we can‘t recommend this device over something like the Dell Venue 8. Give it 6 months or so and you‘ll be able to pick it up for about R2,000 ““ that‘s probably the price it deserves.
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