Acer Iconia Tab 7 A1-713

You can think of the Acer Iconia Tab 7 as a giant phone or a smaller tablet. Yep it's one of those tricky devices that bridges the gap between the two types of gadget. At around £150, the Tab 7 works much better when thought of as a cheapy 3G Android tablet. It's not a patch on the Nexus 7 in some respects, but it's worth a closer look if 3G is a must. It's also pretty slim and light at 8.9mm thick and 298g in weight. This makes it fairly easy to heft with one hand.

Acer Iconia A1-713 sports a 7-inch TFT display with a resolution of 600 x 1024 pixels. These numbers add up to a pixel density of 170ppi. Acer hasn’t done a great job when it comes to the screen and it is definitely not one of the best we have seen. If you look quite closely, you can differentiate between individual pixels and unfortunately, that’s not the quality we expect from a 7-inch tablet.

Running on a Mediatek MT8382 quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz, the Tab 7 isn't breaking any speed barriers and there was noticeable delay when switching between portrait and landscape, probably not helped by having just 1GB of RAM inside. The better news is that it's running Android 4.4 KitKat right out of the box (unlike the One 7), though unfortunately for the purists, you'll have a few extra pre-installed apps on top.

It seems pretty clear to us that both, the 2-megapixel rear camera and the VGA front-facing camera, are mere add-ons and you would be better off forgetting they exist. The rear camera doesn't have auto-focus. The captured images have smudged details and the colours are also slightly off. For those interested (we don't know why), it can also capture videos at a lowly 480p resolution.

Overall, this affordable seven-inch tablet meets pretty much all the needs of students or just anyone who wants a tablet for browsing, reading, social media, listening to music or watching online movies. Those looking for a bigger screen or want a more powerful tablet should look elsewhere (and cough up a few hundred dollars more).