Acer Iconia Tab P11 review: Android tablet with a metal body and 11-inch screen

Android tablets are not the most popular devices right now. But there is a certain demand. They are mostly bought for watching videos, surfing the web, making video calls, or for a child. So these are mostly budget tablets, or mid-range models with not very powerful hardware. Today we’re going to talk about the new mid-range Android tablet Acer Iconia Tab P11, which has a metal body, a large display, and a few other interesting features.

Acer Iconia Tab P11 specifications

Package contents

The Acer Iconia Tab P11 comes in two boxes with a common cover that shows the tablet and lists the main features. The larger box contains the Acer Iconia Tab P11 itself, a 20W charger, a USB Type-C cable, a tray eject tool, and documentation.

In a separate box is a branded protective book cover. In addition to its protective function, it can also be used as a stand with two different tilt angles.

Design and construction

Acer Iconia Tab P11 has a restrained, yet quite stylish appearance. The body is thin and almost entirely made of dark gray metal with a matte surface with a sandblasted anodized finish. The construction feels solid.

On the back there is a rear camera with an LED flash under a common oval glass. In the middle is the black Acer logo. In the upper part you can see a rather thin insert made of black plastic. The antennas of wireless interfaces are located under it. This is the only plastic structural element.

On the front of the Acer Iconia Tab P1 is a large 11-inch display under a protective glass. It does not have the best oleophobic coating: fingers do not slide very well and prints are difficult to wipe off. The bezels around the perimeter of the screen are the same and not very wide. Their width is optimal to comfortably hold the tablet and not touch the screen when not needed.

The front camera is located above the screen, and there is an LED charging indicator next to it. It hasn’t been seen in tablets or smartphones for quite some time.

The thickness of Acer Iconia Tab P11 is 8.1 mm. It’s not a record, but it’s comfortable to hold the tablet in your hands. The side bezels are flat with even angles. There are four speakers on the sides (in the horizontal position). The right side also has a Type-C connector and a tray. Mobile networks are not supported, so there is no space for a SIM card. But you can install an additional MicroSD memory card.

In the upper right corner of the tablet there is a standard 3.5 mm jack for headphones or a headset. The location is quite unusual, but we’ve already seen it in other models.

One of the microphones is located on the bottom of Acer Iconia Tab P11. Another one is on top. Also on the top edge are the power and volume buttons, next to which is a hole with a reset button.

The Acer Iconia Tab P11 has a nice minimalist design, a metal body, and weighs 550 grams, which is quite good for an 11-inch model.

Display

Acer Iconia Tab P11 has an 11-inch display with a resolution of 2000×1200 dots, an aspect ratio of 16:10, and a pixel density of about 212 PPI. It uses an IPS matrix with a layer of QLED quantum dots. It is claimed that the maximum brightness is 400 cd/m², static contrast is 1350:1, and color coverage is 100% of the NTSC color space. The refresh rate is 90 Hz.

The screen is of high quality, with maximum viewing angles, rich colors and a good level of brightness. But the settings are minimal: apart from brightness, scale, font size, dark theme and night mode, there are no nighttime options. There’s no refresh rate setting, no color reproduction modes or color temperature adjustment.

The screen has a good brightness level of 387.856 cd/m² and a static contrast ratio of 1137:1. The color gamut is indeed much wider than sRGB and the screen is perfectly calibrated. The color reproduction is very close to the benchmarks:

Platform and performance

The performance of the Acer Iconia Tab P11 is not the latest budget processor MediaTek MediaTek Helio G99 MT8781. It is manufactured on a 6-nanometer process, contains two 2.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A76 cores and six 2.0 GHz ARM Cortex-A55 cores. The Mali-G57 MC2 accelerator with a frequency of up to 1 GHz is responsible for graphics. The RAM is 8 GB LPDDR4X, and the storage is 256 GB. Additionally, there is support for microSD cards.

The performance level is rather modest. But given the main usage scenarios (YouTube, mail, browser, messengers and social networks), this is not critical. Although the interface is hardly lightning fast.

Gaming performance is also not the strongest point of Acer Iconia Tab P11. If you run simple mobile games like Candy Crush installed out of the box, you won’t have any problems. CoD Mobile also works quite normally and stably. Heavier games are a little worse: Diablo Immortal has noticeable FPS drops and intermittent stutter.

Under prolonged maximum loads, performance may jump slightly. In the CPU Throttling Test stress test, there was a drop of up to 82%. But the body of the tablet remains cold.

Acer Iconia Tab P11 is equipped with dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.2, and GPS. There is no version with support for mobile networks. To unlock the tablet, you can only use a PIN, password, or pattern. There is no fingerprint scanner and face recognition is not supported.

The tablet runs on a pure Android 14 OS without any shells. So the interface is quite standard. It has features designed for devices with large screens: a two-column settings menu, an application manager in the form of a two-row table, split-screen mode, etc.

There are minimal applications installed out of the box. A few simple games, as well as Google Kids Space and YouTube Kids, which are aimed at children.

Sound and camera

Acer Iconia Tab P11 has four speakers. They are quite powerful and have a good volume margin. But the quality is not the best: there are practically no low frequencies. Which is surprising, given the size of the tablet. But the quality is good enough for watching videos or your favorite TV shows.

The main camera of the Acer Iconia Tab P11 has a single module with a resolution of 13 megapixels, autofocus (which does not always work well) and the ability to shoot video at 2560p 30 frames per second. The front camera has a resolution of 5 megapixels and lacks autofocus. Photos taken with the main camera are good in sufficient light:

Battery life

Acer Iconia Tab P11 is equipped with an 8000 mAh battery. The manufacturer promises up to 13 hours of operation. Of course, this figure depends very much on the usage scenarios. If you’re surfing the web or chatting in messengers, the tablet will last a really long time. Playing games or watching YouTube or movies will reduce this performance.

In the PCMark battery test, the tablet lasted almost 10 hours at 50% brightness. This is a very good result, considering the 11-inch display. Acer Iconia Tab P11 supports wired charging with a power of only 20 watts. So it takes approximately 2.5 hours to fully charge.