Acer Iconia W510 Review!!

The tablet-plus-keyboard format seems highly appealing to the manufacturers of windows 8 tablets. It can be seen with the everyday launch of this format. The Acer’s Iconia W510 is the another entry in this new arena that have dispensed many pretence in other products.it is a tablet plus keyboard dock bundle running on Windows 8. The Iconia comes with a price of 950$ or approx. 52000 in Indian Rupees. With 10.1 inch screen and Atom processor it is much close to netbook rather than a laptop.

The design is classy with shiny metallic finish on the rear. the maximum construction is of plastic with attractive white bezel and gorilla glass front screen. Weighing just 580g with thickness just 9mm, it is lighter than many android tablets. Thus it is easy to handle with just one hand.

The keyboard dock is same textured to match the bezel. Weighing 1.25 kg, it weighs more than the tablet. The clipping mechanism is very robust and makes the whole setup feel firmly attached.

Screen & Sound:

Like other Windows 8 convertiles, it has a !0.1 inches screen with a resolution of 1366x768, ensuring high pixel density. The screen is very sharp and bright, along with rich colour for viewing pholos, playing games and videos.

The convertible is loaded with side-firing speakers making it a bit tinny with a tendency of sibilance when the volume is raised.

Cameras

The W510 consists of two camera-a 2 MP at front and a 8 MP camera at back. The front one works well in good light, but produce noise when the light is dim.

Connectivity

the W510 has a good connectivity on the tablet, with a micro-USB socket and a micro HDMI output. There is a microSD card slot to boost the memory upto 64 GB.

Software

The Acer’s Iconia W510 runs on a 32-bit version of window 8, thus one have the access to full range Apps and Window Applications. But, contrary to this we don’t get  the Windows RT versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint bundled in. we get modern user interface, Internet Explorer 10, and many tablet-friendly Apps for when we are in tablet mode,  and the classic window desktop while in netbook mode.

Performance

The W510 is loaded with an Atom Z2760 ‘cover tail’ processor and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. The Z2760 is an improvement of its previous Atoms, with a 1.8 GHz clock speed and a built-in Power VR SGX 545 GPU. Thus we can say that the W510 has more than enough power to run the Window Apps and Office Apps as well as web apps too. Even 1080 HD video plays back without any issue.

Verdict

Since the W510 runs on Windows 8 instead of Windows RT, it instantly avoids one of biggest issue of Windows Tablets, the lack of convincing software in the app store. Also it offers decent performance and excellent battery life. But, the usability is affected by the compromises of keyboard layout, but it makes up for it with a satisfactory screen and comfortable weight. Not a best productivity tool but a solid general purpose choice.