Acer Iconia Tab A700 review

No one would ever accuse Acer of making eye-catching tablets. The 10.9mm-thick A700, with a dimpled silver black and silver edges, along with slightly darker silver sides and a black front bezel, is a strange mishmash of hues, finishes, and angles. (There's also an all-black version.) The one uniquely Acer touch is the square camera lens protruding from the back of the tablet, but even that neither adds to nor subtracts from the slate's appeal. As you hold the tablet horizontally, the sides are nearly flat, but the top and bottom are rounded and tapered — the look doesn't really work. The flat sides are less comfortable to grip than the rounded top and bottom, which is odd given that you're clearly designed to use the tablet in landscape mode. The device is solidly built, but there's nothing impressive about it.

The design and materials are changed ever so slightly from the A510, but the ports and layout are not. Power button and headphone jack on the upper left side; volume control and rotation lock on top; SIM card and microSD slots underneath a flimsy flap on the right side, next to a Micro HDMI port. The charging port is on the bottom, flanked by two stereo speakers.

Normally I don't like when speakers point out the bottom of a tablet, since sound gets easily muffled when you place the slate on a bed or a table. The A700's speakers are slightly less affected by this, since they sit on the tapered edge and actually point slightly backward as well, but you're still going to want to point them somewhere other than into your comforter. Sound is relatively loud and clear, though the low-end is basically nonexistent, as is the stereo effect. Through a partnership with Dolby there are some equalizer settings you can tweak to change the sound to your liking, but there's only so much you can do to improve mediocre speakers.

Guess how good the cameras are on the A700. Go ahead, guess.

If you guessed "pretty much exactly the same as every other tablet camera," you win. The 5-megapixel rear shooter is faster than most tablet cameras, but the results are the same noisy, grainy, soft photos I'm all too accustomed to. I'd wish for a sensor like the 41-megapixel shooter inside the Nokia 808 PureView, but no matter the prowess of the camera I can't imagine taking a lot of important pictures with a tablet. The A700's camera is fine for taking pictures of menus or wine labels and saving them to Evernote, or for taking the occasional shot to upload to Instagram, and that's really all I need it to be.

You can shoot 1080p, 720p, or VGA video with the A700, and it's a different story with the same ending: soft, grainy, noisy, and generally not very good even in the best of situations. Given the size and weight of this (and any) tablet, it's hard to hold still while you shoot video, which means you're going to get some really shaky footage as well.

The front-facing, 720p camera (that's less than one megapixel) is good enough to work for video chat or checking your hair, but that's it. The lens is located about two inches off-center, which makes framing your face in the shot oddly difficult — though you'll get some unintentional rule-of-thirds framing with the lens where it is.

The A700 runs Android 4.0.4, and Acer's added a number of things to the OS without totally overhauling it. The changes aren't nearly on the scale of Samsung's TouchWiz UI, which changes basically every single thing about the OS, but there's quite a bit to get used to. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, Acer redesigned the standard Home, Back, and multitasking buttons — I don't mind the new icons as much as I just don't understand the need to change them. Acer also completely overhauled the quick settings menu, removing everything except for eight power and radio toggles and a brightness slider. It does make accessing brightness or toggling airplane mode easy, but it's seriously ugly: Acer's teal accents clash with Android's blue colors, and the two-tone gray design is simply unsightly.

In the center of the persistent bottom bar on the A700 lies a garish yellow circle that your eyes will constantly be drawn to as you use the tablet. I hate the icon, but love the functionality: when you tap it, it brings up the Acer Ring, a wheel overlay that lets you quickly search, access four customizable apps (by default it lets you open Gallery, Browser, or Settings, or take a screenshot) change the volume, or flip through your bookmarks. Once I customized the ring, it became a handy way to quickly add a note to Evernote, or switch back to my email without flipping through all the multitasking cards. If you don't want the ugly icon always in your face, you can easily turn it off in settings.