Acer Iconia Tab A510 review

In an Olympic year, pointless endorsements and sponsorships are inevitable. Everything from mugs and T-shirts to jewellery and bed linen will bear the five rings this summer. Now, you can add an Android tablet to that list. The Acer Iconia Tab A510, to be precise.

To be fair to Acer, the branding is subtle, and limited to five monochrome rings on the tablet's rear. Otherwise, it's cosmetically similar to the recently launched A200: it's coated in matte silver – but the finish is plasticky, the tablet is quite thick at 11.2mm, and heavy at 678g.

There's also little excitement to be found around the edges, with a standard array of ports and slots: there's a 3.5mm headphone socket, a micro-HDMI output, and a microSD slot for expanding the tablet's internal allocation of 32GB, while a micro-USB socket set into the bottom edge is used to both charge the tablet and transfer files back and forth.

A 5-megapixel camera on the rear creates passable snaps and 1080p video, but there's no flash to help out in low light. The display is fine, but again breaks no new ground with its 1,280 x 800 resolution. The 372cd/m2 maximum brightness, meanwhile, is distinctly middle-of-the-road.

Given the A510's rather bland appearance and unadventurous feature set, we're not sure how many people will be persuaded by the Olympic association, no matter how patriotic they might be feeling. Fortunately, the rings aren't the only enhancement. Acer has also boosted the power over the A200, upping the processor from a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 T20 to a Tegra 3 running at 1.3GHz.