Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40
PROS
- Decent screen resolution
- Affordable price
CONS
- Contrast-sapping screen
- Underpowered CPU/GPU
- Polarising bling additions
KEY FEATURES
- 10.1-inch 1,920 x 1,200 pixel IPS LCD screen
- 32GB storage
- microSD slot
- MediaTek MT8163 quad-core 1.5GHz CPU
- 2GB DDR3 RAM
- Android 6.0
- Quad-driver speakers
- Manufacturer: Acer
- Review Price: £179.99
WHAT IS THE ACER ICONIA TAB 10 A3-A40?
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 is a low-cost Android tablet, but one that just includes a reasonable set of core specs for the money.
Most notable here is the 1,920 x 1,200 pixel screen, which helps to lift the A3-A40 out of the pixellated swamp in which most ultra-budget tablets still live. It’s only a pity the display is dated in other respects, and that the processor only just provides enough power to keep the tablet ticking over.
There aren’t many better 10-inch equivalents at £179, but there are better 8-inch tablets out there.
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ACER ICONIA TAB 10 A3-A40 – DESIGN AND FEATURES
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 is a 10.1-inch widescreen tablet. Its design is more like that of the first Android tablets than the trendiest models we see today. It’s a tablet you'll use with two hands; it's a little too big and heavy to be used comfortably single-handedly.
Held between two palms, though, it feels right at home. It weighs 529g and is 8.9mm thick, and for all its surface-level bling, the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 is a plastic-shelled tablet that doesn’t feel anywhere near as fancy as an iPad.
Build quality feels decent enough at first, but again, it isn't close to what is on offer from Apple. Hand pressure can result in some flexing, turning the whole screen slightly greenish. Yikes.
The rubberised plastic rear of the device is lightly textured for extra grip, and the sides are plain plastic.
There are parts of the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40's design that will raise eyebrows, for better or worse. Prime example: on the rear of the device is a chromed bronze plate that houses the camera; it also flips off to reveal the microSD slot and the micro-HDMI, which lets you hook the tablet up to a TV.
There’s 32GB storage included in the tablet, which may be ample for your needs. It’s Acer’s main act of generosity.
The metal elements of the design appear on the front too. A stepped gradient along the speaker grilles and buttons at the centre of each side are of the same bronze shade. Acer has tried hard to steer clear of the A3-A40 looking like an anonymous black rectangle, but its design flourishes aren't entirely classy.
In fact, I'd describe it as the tablet decoration equivalent of cheap jewellery.
ACER ICONIA TAB 10 A3-A40 – SCREEN
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40’s best feature is its display. A screen resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 is high enough to make images look reasonably sharp. It isn’t at the point of making the screen “Retina” grade – where you struggle to see any pixels at all – but it’s satisfyingly sharp.
Colours offer decent saturation and plenty of energy. The A3-A40 struggles with the very deepest reds, plus the colour character is slightly pastelly, but the effect is pleasant enough.
There is one big issue with the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40’s screen, however. Its recessed architecture is reflective and contrast-sapping, making the display panel itself appear grey rather than black. This is because the display isn’t fully laminated, where the touchscreen, display and top glass are bonded together in one layer. Having separate layers results in some light reflection, which in turn leads to that grey cast.
See what we mean? The display, turned off, is quite grey rather than near-black
The brighter the room, the worse the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 will look. The lack of an ambient light sensor also means that the A3-A40 doesn't feature an auto brightness setting; you need to alter the brightness manually. However, the omission on a tablet is nowhere near as annoying as it is on a phone.
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 does have a blue-light filter mode, though, which gives the screen a slightly orange tinge to help reduce eyestrain. It's handy if you're going to read on the tablet before bed.
ACER ICONIA TAB 10 A3-A40 – SOFTWARE
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 runs Android 6.0, and has quite a few Acer software customisations. However, on the surface it looks just like standard Android, which is a good thing.
You get plain homescreens and the "white page" apps menu seen on vanilla Android gadgets.
The main Acer alteration is an extra custom homescreen to the left of the default one, called Left Page. It’s a feed that spits out news stories and Facebook/Twitter updates; it's similar to the bonus HTC homescreen, BlinkFeed.
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It’s a neat idea, but its implementation isn't perfect here. Left Page is a little sluggish; it crashed several times during testing. It will need to overcome such issues if it's to be used every day.
The rest of the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40’s custom software comes in the form of extra apps. Some are simple utilities, but there are a couple of apps for kids too. There’s a digital colouring book and Kid Center, a video app with numerous clips – like a pre-school YouTube. Like the design of the A3-A40, these kids' apps are unusual and may put some off. The bigger issue is that they can't be deleted; the idea that these are "system apps" is somewhat comical.
This isn’t a bloat-free tablet. However, I do appreciate that it looks and feels much more like "normal" Android than older Acer devices. And with 32GB storage, space isn't in short supply.
ACER ICONIA TAB 10 A3-A40 – SPECS, BENCHMARKS AND PERFORMANCE
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40’s basic navigation feels reasonably responsive, apart from the slightly sluggish Left Page homescreen. Acer has stretched the CPU, however. The tablet has a fairly weak MediaTek MT8163 processor, the kind of chipset that we’d normally see in a 720p device, not a 1080p one (and this tablet is 1200p).
Sure enough, this results in issues with high-end games. Asphalt 8’s frame rate is fairly poor; you'll need to turn down the graphics to “low” to get it running acceptably. It's a similar story with Dead Trigger 2 – it’s choppy even at the default “medium” setting, and it's rare to see this game run poorly.
This is proof that the hardware requirements of 1080p/1200p devices are of the next level up, which would be an eight-core processor. The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40’s CPU has four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz.
Most casual games run well enough, but the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 isn't a particularly good gaming device, which is no great surprise when you consider that 1,920 x 1,200 is the absolute maximum resolution supported by the chipset.
General performance when switching between the homescreens and apps menu is fine, but app loads are a little slow. The tablet doesn’t feel annoyingly laggy, but you can tell that this isn’t a super-powerful device. Performance is simply acceptable, nothing more.
Looking a little deeper, the MT8163 uses the dual-core version of the Mali-T720 GPU. This isn't a high-end GPU, and while it’s used in a number of phones, it's almost always in models from obscure brands such as Bluboo, Mlais and Cubot.
The GPU would do the job in a 1,280 x 800 tablet, but we’re seeing its limits tested here. The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 also uses DDR3 rather than DDR4, but this is very unlikely to be a performance bottleneck when there’s a reasonable 2GB of RAM on board
ACER ICONIA TAB 10 A3-A40 – CAMERA
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 has two cameras, one on the rear and one on the front, but both are nothing to shout about. Its rear camera has a 5-megapixel sensor and no flash, and feels as though Acer has added this unit simply because it feels a tablet should have a rear camera.
Image quality is poor. In fact, just about every smartphone over £50 sports a better camera than that included here. Detail is low, making photos appear vague even when they’re simply viewed on the tablet display without zooming in.
Note that the final images look quite different from what you’ll see straight after shooting too. Photos go through a final sharpening filter to increase appreciable detail. The filter does its best, but this isn't a tablet with which to record important memories.
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The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 isn’t particularly fast to shoot either, with between half-a-second and a second of shutter lag. Its app also looks out of place; it's a phone app that has been blown up to tablet proportions. It works fine, and it well laid-out, but the button icons are cartoonishly big.
Around the front, the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40’s selfie camera is basic, too. Its 2-megapixel sensor tends to flatten fine facial detail and simply produce fairly lo-fi images. At the price, the Asus ZenPad S 8.0 Z580CA includes better front and rear cameras.
ACER ICONIA TAB 10 A3-A40 – BATTERY LIFE
Some budget tablets offer great battery life since they only have to drive a fairly undemanding 1,280 x 800 pixel screen. However, this isn't the case here: the A3-A40’s 10.1-inch 1200p display takes its toll on the 6,100mAh battery.
An hour of Netflix streamed over Wi-Fi used up 21% of the battery, suggesting you’ll get just under five hours of use between charges. An hour of 3D gaming went through 26% of the battery’s reserves, equating to a little under four hours of gaming use.
Acer says the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 should last eight hours between charges, but you’re only going to get stamina approaching that if you dim the screen and feed the tablet super-light tasks. Note that without fast-charging, a full recharge takes a few hours.
ACER ICONIA TAB 10 A3-A40 – SPEAKERS
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 has a speaker array that sounds great on paper. There are four front-facing drivers, getting you very solid stereo presentation.
There are sound controls on the front, too. A rocker sits to the left of the screen, letting you change volume easily, while a button in the same spot on the right side alters the EQ preset. These are DTS-HD modes that tweak the EQ to provide beefier sound for movies, or a mid-range sound for, well, I’m not sure what you’d use the other modes for because the Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 needs all the help it can get.
Despite using four speakers, the A3-A40 sounds quite hard and relatively thin, without the fuller mids and hint of bass that makes listening to music and podcasts through the best tablet speakers enjoyable. There’s plenty of bluster, thanks to those bronze speaker grilles, but the results aren’t that great.
SHOULD YOU BUY THE ACER ICONIA TAB 10 A3-A40?
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 is better than other Android tablets in the £110-130 range because it has a 1,920 x 1,200 pixel screen – it isn't grossly pixellated, and therefore is a big upgrade.
However, it doesn’t quite do enough elsewhere to be a complete success – or to avoid appearing a little dated in parts.
The Acer Iconia Tab 10 A3-A40 is begging for a fully laminated display – it looks greyed-out without one – and the processor isn’t quite fast enough, leaving high-end games and some parts of the UI struggling.
While there are no real killer 10-inch budget tablets on the market right now, it’s likely that the Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 will get you better performance.
VERDICT
A budget Android tablet with a sharp screen, but gaming performance is compromised.
SCORES IN DETAIL
- Battery Life7
- Build Quality6
- Design7
- Performance6
- Screen Quality7
- Software & Apps7
- Sound Quality6
- Value6
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