£99 Acer B1-A71 tablet revealed at CES 2013

 

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By Dave Stevenson

Posted on 10 Jan 2013 at 16:27

Acer has used CES 2013 to announce the B1-A71, a 7in tablet running Android 4 (Jelly Bean).

The real headline is the price: at £99 the B1-A71 undercuts the Google Nexus 7 by around £60 and the cheapest iPad by more than £180.

Running a 1.2GHz processor and offering 8GB of storage, the B1-A71 is unlikely to be the last word in performance, but will likely suffice for those with modest aspirations for a tablet, such as basic web surfing and email duties.

The screen is a twisted nematic (TN), rather than the higher quality In-Plane Switching, TFT but Acer hopes that customers will be swayed primarily by the B1-A71’s low price.

One major tick in its favour is its microSD slot, allowing users to expand the available storage by up to 32GB.

Although Android tablets have made occasional forays towards affordability we've yet to see one that offers a reasonable user experience for the money - the last £99 tablet reviewed by PC Pro was the dismal 7in Next Media Tablet, whose 300MHz processor and 128MB of RAM was nowhere near enough to deliver the kind of performance users demand.