Thursday 11 April 2013

Acer Iconia W510




Acer's Iconia W510 works just fine as a standalone Windows 8tablet, but comes with a slimline keyboard with secure docking system for those times when you need a bit more -- and that's where the problems start.
It's on sale now for around £500.


Design
It's a good-looking piece of work, with its silvery aluminium livery (not real though, it's plastic, which helps keep the weight down) and neatly curving edges. The tablet weighs a perfectly acceptable 570g on its own (well below the lightest iPad 2's 652g) and it's got a pretty good line-up of connections, including micro USB (there's a full-size one on the accompanying keyboard), micro HDMI, microSD memory card slot and 3.5mm headphone jack. There's also an eight-megapixel camera with LED flash on the back and a two-megapixel version on the front for video calls -- both can record 1080p video.
The 10.1-inch "CineCrystal" display is protected by Gorilla Glass and offers a not-quite-full-HD resolution of 1,366x768 pixels, around 157 pixels-per-inch, which still looks decently sharp and detailed. It supports five-point touch rather than the ten-point which is becoming increasingly common -- a problem for piano apps perhaps, but not too much of an issue in general use.
The accompanying keyboard is extremely slim too, or at least it would be if it wasn't for the chunky dock that twists to accommodate the tablet. It looks a bit like a Mothercare accessory but at least it's practical -- the dock clips in neatly and feels very secure, whatever angle you set it to, with a release switch for when you need to cut it loose.
The problem is that the tablet doesn't balance well with the keyboard, so it tends to keel over all too easily if you have it set up on a table or desktop. The keys are a little on the small side, and the touchpad buttons are marked by a thin line, but they're so slim that it's easy to miss them, leading to the cursor wandering off at regular opportunities.
Features and performance
It's running the full-fat Windows 8 so you can add pretty much any software you like, without having to rely on the app store. As we've said elsewhere there's a bit of a learning curve involved with the touch-centric Windows 8 interface ( no Start button, unfamiliar menus), but once you get the hang of swiping to access functions and menus it's a pretty good interface.
That's not a problem, but the 1.5GHz dual core processor is. On paper, it should be a perfectly fine workhorse, but in practice we found it unforgivably slow in operation. Loading programs seemed to take forever, even browsing was an unattractively sedate experience. In benchmarking tests it struggled to get a PC Mark of 1,439 -- which makes it the lowest ranking tablet we've ever tested. In actual performance terms, it did no better, taking over 13 minutess to encode our test 11-minute movie for iTunes (two or three minutes is the norm) and play of Portal was unforgivably sluggish, with frankly pathetic frame rates of just 10fps.
However, the sluggish processor probably played its part in helping the battery keep going long after many others would have bitten the dust --you'll easily get more than a day's solid use out of it.
Conclusion
The Acer Iconia W510 is a good-looking tablet with a securely fastening dock on the accompanying keyboard that gives you instant laptop capability. It has a good array of ports and full-fat Windows 8 but it's let down badly by its underpowered processor which just about copes with light tablet duties, but struggles severely when it has to deal with standard laptop drills.
Image: Intel_DE/Flickr/CC


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