Acer Iconia One 8 (B1-850) Review
By Sascha Segan
Generous storage for the price.
Dual-band Wi-Fi.
Full Google Play compatibility.
Limited RAM.
Poor cameras and speakers.
The Acer Iconia One 8 is far from perfect, but it's one of the better Android tablets you'll find for less than $100.
Yes, the $99.99 Acer Iconia One 8 (B1-850) has been around for a while, but we wanted to take a close look at this inexpensive Android tablet because there's still a place for it, and there aren't a lot of other affordable options from reliable brands available. If you're looking for a tablet in the $100 range with full Google Play compatibility, the Iconia One 8 is definitely worth considering. If you're more focused on music and video playback, though, we'd encourage you to look at the slightly less expensive Amazon Fire HD 8 .
Don't expect faux-metal finishes like on the Posh Equal Max S900 ( at Amazon) . The B1-850 ($99.99 at Acer) is white plastic, at 8.27 by 4.96 by 0.37 inches (HWD) and 12 ounces, with a textured back that makes it a bit grippy. The screen has a big bezel around it, and the headphone jack, microSD slot, and micro USB port are all on the top edge.
The 8-inch, 1,280-by-800 screen is decent and not too dim, unlike many cheaper Android tablets from less reliable manufacturers. It's also higher resolution than the 1,024-by-600 screens you may see at this price point. But it's covered in a cheap plastic that can be unpleasant to touch when it's smeared with smudges and detritus, which happens very quickly. Somehow, the coating on Amazon's tablets is better able to resist the smudging of daily use. Reflectivity also makes it hard to use outdoors. Unlike the Lenovo Tab 3 Essential, the B1-850 is not water resistant.
Amazon Fire HD 8 (2017)
Best for Rock-Bottom Price
Amazon Fire 7 (2017)
Posh Mobile Equal Max S900
Best for A Big Screen on a Budget
Amazon Fire HD 10
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Android and Performance
The B1-850 uses the same 1.3GHz MediaTek 8163 processor as in Amazon's Fire HD 8, and benchmarks pretty much the same. There's one big exception that worries us, though: Several of our benchmark ran out of memory during testing. The tablet's 1GB of RAM just isn't enough to handle graphics-heavy games and multitasking. Even relatively simple, but fast-moving, games like Temple Run 2 stuttered while loading and showed lag in controls. Application load times were also sluggish.
The tablet runs Android 5.1 with a heavy load of Acer bloatware. About 11GB of the 16GB of internal storage comes free; you can tuck up to a 256GB microSD card into a slot in the top, and you can move apps to the card. As it's been a year since this tablet came out and it hasn't received an Android 6.0 update (let alone Android 7.0), it's probably safe to say it never will.
The major advantage here is full access to the Google Play store. You get access to all the Google services missing from Amazon tablets, such as Google Maps and Google Docs, as well as a much broader array of games. And remember, you can install Amazon's app store here, too. Acer adds its own cloud music and photos apps, but you can safely ignore them.
Dual-band Wi-Fi is another plus over Amazon's tablet, if you have a dual-band router. Here at PCMag, we have a relatively slow 2.4GHz network and a faster 5GHz network. While Amazon's tablet performed a bit better than Acer's at 2.4GHz, the 5GHz option on the Iconia 8 meant better results overall in testing.
Battery life is deeply disappointing, however. We only got 4 hours, 20 minutes of video streaming at maximum brightness—half the life of Amazon's tablet. That probably speaks to Amazon's smart management of background applications. In our two days of testing the Acer tablet, we'd occasionally get messages about things like Acer's abPhoto cloud photo storage application running in the background.
The 5-megapixel main camera and 2-megapixel front camera produce photos that are both blurry and noisy. Indoor shots are soft at best, and outdoor shots are riddled with compression artifacts. Honestly, in very low light the cameras are not worth using. There's an HDR mode, but it's painfully slow.
Video recording isn't great, either. The front-facing camera delivered VGA video at 17 frames per second, dropping to 10fps in indoor lighting. The main camera managed 720p video at 30 frames per second outdoors, dropping to 20 in low light.
The single, rear-ported speaker is much louder than the one on the Amazon Fire HD 8. But it's also very tinny. On a complex track like M83's "Midnight City," the drums basically vanish under over-emphasized, keening synthesizers. On more vocal-heavy tracks, the voices punch far ahead of any instruments, with the Amazon tablet delivering a much richer, more balanced mix. That difference carries on in headphones, too, where Amazon's tablet pushes a lot more bass than the Iconia One 8 does.
The reality is that you're not going to get a really good tablet for less than $100 without a subsidy, and if you go with a carrier, you're going to pay monthly fees for cellular connectivity. Along with the Acer Iconia 8, there are the Amazon Fire ($34.99 at Amazon) and the Fire HD 8, the Lenovo Tab3 Essential, the Samsung Galaxy Tab E Lite, and a host of off-brand alternatives.
On features, the Acer Iconia One 8 beats the Lenovo and Samsung tablets by offering 16GB of storage, which you really need on an Android tablet. The Amazon Fire HD 8 is better for multimedia enjoyment and playback thanks to its screen coating and far better speakers, but if you want the rich array of third-party apps available in Google's store, the Iconia 8 gets you there. Our Editors' Choice for budget tablets, meanwhile, remains the Amazon Fire. The 7-inch Fire delivers most of the performance you get from these $99 tablets for half the price, it's just a bit smaller.
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About Sascha Segan
PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society. Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite cities are Barcelona and Hong Kong. While he's a fourth-generation Manhattanite, he now lives in Queens with his wife and daughter.
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