Here it is, folks: our first Windows 8 device. No, not the first we've laid hands on, but the first built-for-Win-8 PC that we've been able to take home and spend some quality time with. If you don't remember today's specimen, you'd be forgiven: the Acer Iconia W510 is one of many, many tablet / laptop hybrids that have debuted over the past few months. Plus, this isn't even the highest-end Windows 8 PC Acer has to offer: unlike the W700, which has a 1080p screen and Ultrabook guts, the W510 runs off a Clover Trail-based Atom processor, and has a smaller 10.1-inch (1,366 x 768) display.
Accordingly, the price is also lower: the W510 will start at $500 for the tablet only, though you'll also be able to purchase it with the detachable keyboard dock for $750. (And if the dock really does double the battery life to 18 hours, you might want to.) Though the W510 won't be available for a few weeks yet -- it goes on sale November 9th -- we've gotten a hold of an early unit. An important note: the model we tested was pre-production, so we'll hold off on benchmarking for now and update our story with performance scores and a review card once we have the chance to test a final unit. In the meantime, if you're looking for a deeper dive on the hardware, you've come to the right place.
Look and feel
It was almost a year ago that Acer CEO J.T. Wang vowed the company would stop making "cheap and unprofitable products" and focus on more premium items -- namely, Ultrabooks. And yet, the W510 feels like precisely the sort of low-end netbook that earned Acer its reputation for slipshod quality in the first place. Mostly, it's the keyboard dock that's the problem: the plastic buttons have a slightly scratchy feel, and look mismatched against the smooth, faux-metal keyboard deck. The hinge is also made of white, textured plastic that seems out of place next to the rest of the system. What's more, there's a large, unsightly gap between the hinge and the keyboard -- again, netbook redux.
Not to go there, but we suspect it's because of products like this that Microsoft's management felt compelled to build the Surface. Even if you left the Surface out of this -- and why not, since we don't know how much it will cost? -- you can still do better than this. Just ask Samsung: the company's Series 5 Slate costs the same with a keyboard dock and has near-identical specs, but the design is considerably more elegant.
The W510 feels like precisely the sort of netbook that earned Acer its reputation for slipshod quality in the first place.
Visceral reactions aside, we have a small concern about the build quality. We found that the screen tends to wobble in its hinge -- a potential inconvenience for folks who work on jostling buses, planes and Amtrak cars. Still, having manhandled our tester machine a bit, we'd say it's safe to pick up the tablet by the screen with the keyboard attached; you don't really have to worry about it falling out. On the plus side, too, the hinge feels sturdy. You can even safely push the screen all the way back so that the keyboard is tucked behind the screen, with the keys face-down against your desk -- not that there's much advantage to using the tablet that way instead of regular clamshell mode.
The tablet itself has the same gray plastic shell, with a white band ringing the edges. On its own, without the keyboard dock nearby, it's actually not a bad piece of kit: plain, yes, but unassuming. In fact, we like the two-tone effect of the white band against the black bezel. The only thing we could have done without is the "Acer" and "Iconia" branding, etched into the plastic on different sides of the devices. Other than that, the tablet feels unexpectedly light, at 1.27 pounds, and for that we have those plastics to thank. (Even with the keyboard, by the way, it weighs just 2.63 pounds) In practice, the 10.1-inch screen is just wide enough that you might have trouble typing in landscape orientation, if your hands aren't that big, but using the onscreen keyboard in portrait mode is easy; even when you're holding the tablet upright, the weight feels balanced enough that you don't have to strain to keep it from tilting backward.
Taking a tour around the device, you'll find the tablet portion is home to all the ports you'd expect to find on a mobile device. Up top, there's a headphone jack, power button and a switch for locking the screen orientation. On the bottom side are the various connectors that allow the tablet to latch into the keyboard dock, and the right landscape edge houses a volume rocker, microSD slot, micro-USB port and micro-HDMI output. The W510 has dual speakers, one on each side of the tablet when you're holding it in landscape mode. Unfortunately, though, they're located precisely where you're likely to grip the device, so it's easy to muffle the sound if you're watching a movie while holding the tablet in-hand. Finally, there's an 8-megapixel camera and LED flash around back, along with a 2-megapixel shooter up front.
The keyboard dock, meanwhile, is home to a full-size USB 2.0 port, along with a built-in nine-hour battery that promises to double the tablet's runtime. What you won't get is an SD card reader -- something ASUS typically offers on its Transformer Pad docks. There's also a charging slot, allowing you to use the same AC adapter you would with the tablet. That power connector is oddly large, but since there are no USB ports nearby, it's not like we have to worry about it obstructing any openings.
Lastly, it's worth mentioning that the tablet's $599 starting price includes a couple of nice-to-have accessories -- the sort of extras Acer doesn't typically bundle with its PCs. These include a micro-HDMI-to-VGA adapter, along with a pigeon-gray, faux-suede case. The sleeve has a super soft lining on the inside, and we appreciate how discreet the branding is; just a small metal logo that fades in with the suede, and nothing more. All in all, an unexpected surprise.
Display and sound
Though we're not impressed by the W510's build quality, its Gorilla Glass display is actually quite nice. Yes, 1,366 x 768 resolution is middle-of-the-road as far as PCs go, but in terms of quality, this IPS panel offers some wide viewing angles. Working with the dock in your lap, you should have some leeway as far as dipping the screen forward or backward (a boon, too, for people who get work done on airplanes). You can even get by watching a movie from a side angle, but we're also aware that people aren't terribly likely to crowd around a machine this small anyway. We'd add, too, that the viewing angles improved as we increased the brightness. At 350 nits, it's quite bright, yet the battery life is robust enough that we never worried that cranking the brightness would have an adverse effect on runtime.
As on other tablets, the W510 doesn't deliver remarkably loud sound, and the audio quality is rather tinny with certain songs. Depending on your musical leanings, though, it's actually pleasant to listen to at the mid-range. Eric Clapton's "Layla" on acoustic guitar is enjoyable, for instance; synthesized songs like MGMT's "Kids," not so much.
Keyboard and touchpad
Something tells us we're going to have to grade these Windows 8 keyboard docks on a curve: it's clear that creating a comfortable typing experience for a machine this small is no simple feat. In fact, we already know that to be true: early netbooks offered terribly dense keyboards, and while PC makers likeToshiba eventually designed 10-inch laptops with more spacious layouts, we didn't really see progress until OEMs started putting out slightly larger 11-inch machines.It doesn't help, then, that the W510 has a 10-, not 11-inch screen: that extra bit of real estate seems to be the difference between a cramped setup and something more usable. As you probably gathered by now, the W510 falls into that first category: in order to fit everything inside that 10.2-inch-wide keyboard deck, Acer had to shrink certain buttons like the Tab key and the four arrows. To Acer's credit, though, it at least used all the available space: the keys extend nearly to the edge of the chassis on either side. While typing, we also found that our fingers easily found the letter keys. If anything, we ran into more problems when our thumbs kept reaching past the space bar and hit the trackpad instead.
Speaking of the trackpad, it doesn't support gestures. That includes Windows 8-specific maneuvers, like swiping right to bring up the Charm Bar, but also two-finger scrolling and pinch-to-zoom. Basic stuff. Now it's true, you have the touchscreen if you want to have the experience of swiping through Live Tiles, but if you're using the device in clamshell mode, reaching up to the screen just to scroll through a webpage or zoom in on a document just isn't convenient. Ditto for clicking on the scroll bar with the mouse button. We just hope this isn't true of all the Windows 8 hybrids we test over the coming months.
Cameras
The W510's 8-megapixel rear shooter performs capably in daylight and with macro shots, though we routinely had to hold the tablet still for a couple seconds after tapping the shutter in the Windows 8 camera app. The shutter, by the way, isn't an onscreen button; you can tap anywhere onscreen to capture. Though there's no tap-to-focus feature, we found that, with still photos at least, the camera homed in on exactly the parts of photos we would have expected it to. With 1080p video, though, our clips sometimes slipped in and out of focus, as if the lens wasn't sure what the highlight of the shot was. Across the board, colors appear fairly muted, but you should notice a good deal of detail in your full-res, 8MP shots. Lower-lit shots will look a bit duller, of course, but even then, the noise level was tolerable.
Performance
When it comes to things tablets are supposed to be good at, the W510 shines.
For the most part, when we compare the W510 to netbooks, we're making a dig at its cheap build quality. But there's something else the two have in common: internals. Like netbooks of yore, the W510 packs an Intel Atom processor -- a 1.8GHz dual-core Z2760 CPU from the Clover Trail series, to be exact. Also like a netbook, it comes with 2GB of RAM. For storage, you'll get a 32GB SSD if you choose the lowest-end $500 model; every other configuration has 64GB of on-board storage. Either way, an SSD isn't something we would have taken for granted back in the netbook era; most minis at the time had spinning hard drives.
As you'd expect, the Atom's performance has improved since it debuted in 2008, with the latest-gen Clover Trail chips promising 10 hours of use and three weeks on standby. We'd wager, too, that consumer expectations might have changed: when PC makers were stuffing Atom processors inside netbooks -- essentially, miniature laptops -- they had a heck of a time explaining to consumers what they could and couldn't do with these machines. In the case of tablets, though, we suspect folks will pick up Atom-powered slates like the W510 and expect to use them as they would any other tablet.
And when it comes to things tablets are supposed to be good at -- email, web browsing and video streaming -- the W510 shines. That Z2760 chip is also more than sufficient for handling the overhead of Windows 8. Not only was the touchscreen responsive, but we didn't notice any lag when we launched programs, swiped right to expose the charm bar or swiped left to rotate through open apps.
Again, battery life is rated at up to nine hours on the tablet, and the keyboard dock promises to double that. Once we get a hold of a production-grade unit we'll run not one, but two battery rundown tests and will update this post with those scores.
Wrap-up
Having met with Acer's product team in person (and having read its executives quoted in the press), it's obvious the company is eager to shed its reputation for cheap products and be taken more seriously as an OEM capable of building premium PCs. You can even see glimmers of that in the Iconia W510, with its lovely IPS display and bundled accessories. Ultimately, though, the W510 does a disservice to Acer: with a chintzy build, impotent touchpad and a cramped, netbook-like keyboard, it confirms whatever pre-conceived notions shoppers may have about the brand. And with so many Windows 8 hybrids on the way, including one from Microsoft itself, Acer can't afford to have its products get lost in the mix.
If there's one silver lining, it's this: the W510 performs well. The Clover Trail-based Atom processor inside makes for some zippy performance in Windows 8, and that nine-hour battery is also promising. Though the W510 made a good impression on that front, we'll be curious to see how it fares against the Samsung Series 5 and other hybrids offering similar specs for a similar price. For all we know, the W510 will end up being exceptionally fast and longevous for its class. But you'd have to get past its homely exterior to appreciate it.-->
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