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Curiously, although Acer lists the processor in the Iconia One 7 as running at 1.33Ghz, I found that when I launched GeekBench, it was reported as 1.83Ghz – whether the processor scales depending on the task, or is set to overclock when benchmarked, I couldn't determine.
Geekbench's tests were over quickly and the results came as no huge surprise: a score of 730 in the single-core test pegged it more than 100 points lower than the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7, while the multi-core score of 2,051 placed it some 400 points short of the Nvidia Tegra 4-toting Advent Tegra Note 7.
Futuremark's 3DMark put the One 7 alongside the Tesco Hudl 2 with a score of 13,036 in the Ice Storm Unlimited test, an unsurprising result, considering it packs exactly the same Intel processor.
Lastly, I ran the SunSpider Javascript benchmark in Google's Chrome browser, which tests the processor's capacity to crunch through Java – a widely used programming language on both websites and apps. The score of 795.4ms makes it roughly twice as fast as the quad-core mediatek processor powering the Gigaset QV830 tablet I looked at in October last year.
Despite being outpaced by some older tablets, benchmarks are of course not the definitive indication of how the tablet will perform in day-to-day tasks. Fortunately, I am happy to report that I didn't encounter any noticeable slow-down, no matter how quickly I zipped in and out of applications.
Acer quotes a battery life of 7 hours from the 3,420mAh Lithium Polymer battery. This is a bit of a let-down, as I would have expected something large enough to comfortably handle more than a day of browsing, video playback and games.
After playing Sim City Buildit for no more than 10 minutes, the battery had lost 5%, and playing the faster-paced Real Racing 3 dropped it 7% over the same time period.
After charging the Iconia One 7 fully, I tried running TechRadar's tried-and-tested battery-bashing video on full brightness, which dropped the battery to just 64%, meaning it lost a total of 36% in the same period that the 2014 Nexus 7 dropped just 20%.
If I had to guess I'd say this is likely something to do with the Intel processor's inefficiency at decoding videos compared to counterparts from Qualcomm, and while the battery holds up well enough with less intensive tasks, if you're looking for a gaming companion or something to watch hours of videos on a long trip, it might be worth spending a little more to get an alternative with a higher capacity battery.
