Acer W700 hands-on: Our first serious quality time with a Windows 8 tablet - hurstdreir1946
Unskilled news for cynical tech bloggers, grenade-lobbing Internet trolls, and everyone else WHO's been attacking Windows 8 for the sheer thrill of summercater: I've been using a Windows 8 tablet for terminated a week now, and the experience has been a revelation.
Indeed, if you've been judgement Windows 8 founded happening how well the RTM version works along a tralatitious desktop PC, you harbour't been privy to the full Operating system have.
My tablet essa simulation was a preproduction version of Acer's W700, which Acer formally proclaimed Thursday, promising a ship date of October 26 and prices starting at $799. Until I began using the W700, my Window 8 experience consisted of playacting with the Osmium on a non-touch laptop, and spending a skimp over hardly a transactions with information technology along stochastic tablets and hybrids at press events. But now that I've devoted some serious quality metre to the W700, I can report that the operating system breaks compelling bran-new ground.
In point of fact, Windows 8 might flatbottomed cut off the seaborne space if consumers deign to give Microsoft a fighting chance.
Interested? Intrigued? Peradventur even a bit thwarted operating theatre angry because Microsoft might actually be doing something right? First get me tell you about Genus Acer's early hardware, then I'll get into the pith of how Windows 8 performs as a tablet OS.
This is not the loan-blend you'ray looking for
Contempt whol the brouhaha over Windows 8 hybrids, my first extended Windows 8 experience comes from using a pure tab device—albeit one with bundled accessories studied for laptop-same productivity.
The W700 boasts an 11.6-inch, 1920-by-1080-pixel display whose viewing quality ranks someplace between that of the iPad 2 and that of the parvenue iPad, due in part to the Acer lozenge's pel density of 190 pixels per inch (versus 132 ppi for the the iPad 2 and 264 ppi for the spic-and-span iPad). And with a 16:9 aspect ratio, the W700's copious, vivid IPS display offers a magnanimous expanse of screen realty that's perfect for 1080p video playback, and makes you recall, "Hmm, it sure would be nice if my iPad's screen extended this distant horizontally."
Our test pattern's specs put it at the high stop of the W700's shape range, with such Ultrabook-caliber components as a 1.7GHz Congress of Racial Equality i5 central processor susceptible of turbo bursts of up to 2.6GHz; 4GB of memory; and a 128GB solid-state drive. This hardware profile runs a pricey $999, but that bitter brew might be easier to swallow if you consider the W700's mission to deliver a tab and a work PC in a single package.
Photo: Henry Martyn Robert Cardin Though the W700 doesn't directly attach to a keyboard the way a new hybrid would, it comes with a sturdy cradle that positions the tablet at a 70-degree angle, much like the screen of an open clamshell laptop. The bundle also includes a matching Bluetooth keyboard that never born a keystroke or exhibited any lag during bigeminal periods of nonliteral typing.
Pair the cradled tablet with its keyboard buddy, and you have a serviceable Windows workstation. It's by no substance a utopian productivity system—more about that later—and, certain, many W700 owners wish inevitably experience that "Doh!" moment when they discover they never packed the keyboard in their carry-on. Nonetheless, as a tally package, the W700 offers often more productivity potential than any Android surgery Apple tab.
I set up the W700's styling a trifle overly blingy. The tablet itself looked classy enough: It's by and large touchscreen and Al unibody, then how flamboyant could it be? Still, I'm not a fan of the glistering silver accents and thoroughgoing, white plastic on the cradle and the keyboard. To its credit, the tab exhibited no more flex when I unsuccessful to bend IT in half (sorry, Acer, I had to test!), and the twist's overall progress quality gave me confidence in its long-full term durability.
At 0.47 inch grumous, the W700 easily satisfies Intel's Ultrabook spec (0.82 inch), but it's a bit thicker than the current iPad (0.37 inch). At almost exactly 2.1 pounds, the W700 feels noticeably heavier than the parvenu iPad (1.46 pounds), but the surplus heft didn't seem excessive, perhaps because the weighting scales equally with the surplus screen real acres.
As far as data ports and other points of concern connected the hardware slab, the W700 offers a bit much most Android tablets, and much more than the iPad, including one full-size up USB 3.0 port, a Micro HDMI porthole, and a headphone/speaker combo jack. The tablet's 5-megapixel rear tv camera shoots 1080p television, while its front-facing camera (megapixel count not discovered) shoots 720p. Undramatic stereo speakers are located at the bottom of the twist, and a physical Windows Start screen button sits smack dab in the middle of the lower bezel.
Maybe that button is at that place for people who'll never acquire used to Windows 8's novel tinge controls. I'm non one of these people.
A new admit touch tabletry
One of Android's best qualities is that it offers more customization options and power-user features than iOS. But Windows 8 offers even greater depth of user control. The time I exhausted with the W700 in its pure "Windows 8 style" tablet mode showed me that the big brains in Redmond are introducing few real innovations to the greater touch-operate vocabulary.
The split-riddle view is incomparable of my favorite new tricks. The OS supports rich multitasking, and with a specific finger swipe maneuver, you can naked two different Windows 8 apps on screen. For example, your Mail app can occupy the left pane (which is fixed at roughly one-quarter of the display) patc Explorer can sit in the right pane (which dominates the test). If you ilk, you can flip their positions, moving the skinnier pane to the right position.
Another neat trick: To switch between agape apps, just drag your feel from the socialist sidelong of the screen. Its the Windows 8 version of Alt-Tab, and once again demonstrates just how powerful—and entertaining—the system is relative to the competition. To see a thumbnail filmstrip of all of your agaze apps, cursorily drag your thumb right and so left-hand, from the left-of-center edge of the screen. To access the Windows 8 "charms" legal community—a centralized home for search, sharing, and settings functions, among others—sneak in from the correct bezel.
Prototype: Acer Totally these touch maneuvers became indorse nature once I learned them, but they'Ra non intuitive from the giddy-up, and they're difficult to describe in words. This could emerge arsenic a public dealings pain point for Microsoft. If the company is fashionable, IT will material body a force-run demo picture into Windows 8—something that pops up the front time somebody turns on the new computer hardware.
The demo video would inevitably be met with crushing criticism—oh, conceive of the glorious memes!—just Microsoft necessarily some practical way of didactics users these unintuitive (just ultimately simple) controls.
Challenging learning curves aside, I found the W700's touch controls quick, fluid, and responsive. Test redraws never lagged Oregon stuttered, and the hardware seemed well-equipped to handle the OS's requirements. We didn't run whatever benchmarks on our preproduction whole, but if a Core i5 and 4GB of memory potty't boss a tablet OS around like a schoolyard bully, Microsoft has serious optimization problems.
The Windows 8 Start screen is an engaging alternative to Mechanical man and iOS. Much comparable Mechanical man widgets, Windows 8 "live tiles" place energetic, material-metre updates for various apps on top of your main user interface. For instance, the Weather tile shows current local conditions, and the News tile shows a recent headline along with a exposure. Merely Android widgets want whatever real design constraints, and the result is a home screen that sometimes resembles a exteroception circus. In counterpoint, live tiles conform to retarded blueprint rules that foster a more sober and sophisticated smel.
Of run over, the new Showtime CRT screen is far from perfect. For one thing, without resorting to thirdly-party utilities, a user who wants to boot straight into the scheme's background musical mode can't bypass the Start screen. And as Paul Allen recently pointed outer, the Start screen has no hierarchal nesting system—and so if you cause a huge assembling of apps, you may find yourself scrolling ad nauseam to find a particular live roofing tile.
Even so, end-to-end my week of hands-happening work with the W700, I set up the Start concealment to be a pleasing, effective new take away on a tablet-optimized user interface, and Windows 8 to personify a winning lozenge Osmium. Microsoft's built-in Mail, Calendar, and Net Explorer apps are stripped-down versions of their desktop counterparts, but they more than sufficed to suffer my relatively modest tablet productiveness expectations.
Complete of which brings U.S. to the question of how the W700 and Windows 8 performed in background mode. IT was far better than extraordinary critics have made it dead set atomic number 4, but a gimmick like this definitely presents some compromises.
The screen background: Take the small print!
Critics take in slammed Microsoft for its effectuation of desktop way, citing three major complaints:
- The only way to access the desktop is via the Start screen.
- The desktop no thirster includes a Start button, so to access apps—symmetrical full-along background applications—you have to go back to the Start covert and launch them there.
- The Start test isn't easy to admittance with a mouse, so operation is difficult on legacy devices that lack touchscreens.
The initiative criticism is reasoned. IT's ludicrous that Microsoft doesn't include a toggle switch that lets you boot straight into the desktop.
The second complaint speaks to an flatbottomed greater annoyance: During my time with the W700, I was frequently chagrined by the extra effort obligatory to launch desktop applications. Sure, a third-company accessory from Stardock introduces a Windows 7-style Start button, and you can put together keyboard shortcuts to launch apps. But that sympathetic of finish-feed shouldn't be necessary.
As for the third gripe, victimization mouse control to access the Start screen from the desktop wasn't a problem for me. I simply glided my mouse to the lower-unexhausted recession of the screen to invoke the briny Windows 8 user interface. Easy. Simple. It deeds.
Image: Acer The larger problem with using the W700 as a traditional PC productivity machine lies in the rendering of the Windows desktop. A resolution of 1920 by 1080 happening an 11.6-inch screen makes for little fonts, icons, and scroll bars. And because all of these interface elements were so small, I had trouble seeing text in the URL field of Internet Explorer, for example. Likewise, using cutaneous senses gestures to collapse and exit out of windows—or, for that matter, honorable navigating around the basic Windows experience that I've been using since Windows 3.1—was a dispute.
Make water no mistake: The screen resolution is capital when the W700 is in tablet mode, with Windows 8 optimized for that size. But using the tablet in its cradled desktop mode was nowhere near as easy Beaver State as cozy as employed with, say, a 14-edge, 1366 by 768 Ultrabook.
Would I use the W700 Eastern Samoa my briny productivity machine when traveling? Belik non. It's productivity prowess blows away the iPad or Android tablet competition, if only because this machine gives you a full version of Windows. But I suspect that other upcoming Windows 8 devices will offer more elegant compromises between the tablet and desktop sides of Microsoft's new split-personality Operating system. We'll visualize. We'll take in to test many other Windows 8 devices earlier we'll live the W700's rightful place in the Windows 8 tablet firmament.
I unquestionably appreciated Acer's bundled-in keyboard. It didn't reek of high-end build quality, but it was more comfortable to use than a traditional laptop computer keyboard, since I didn't have to negotiate my deliver a trackpad domain, and I could adjust the keyboard's outstrip from the screen to my heart's content. I only like that Acer had included a mouse as well. During screen background use, I recovered myself relying happening a mixture of touch and sneak out control—rival to curl through documents and to move windows some, and the trusty mouse from my desktop machine for cursor location and text selection.
At to the lowest degree one OS platform should be xenophobic
Though Windows 8 hasn't even launched yet, it's off to a rocky get-go. Power users are slamming Microsoft for all the new "features" that subjugate the desktop, and as we reported on Monday, the Windows Store inventory is sounding alarmingly thin.
Yet, the W700 offers sound proof that a Windows 8 tablet can represent a compelling raisable device with touch controls that are play and easy to use. And luckily for Microsoft, the very capable apps that it builds into the Windows 8 style interface—Explorer, Mail, Photos, People, and more—testament probably account for the vast majority of most casual users' tablet time.
Apple doesn't need to be concerned about the Windows 8 set in motion. The iPad has great momentum, and it's backed by easily the largest and highest-quality apps ecosystem. And Apple doesn't really play the productivity game anyway, regardless of how much it may push the utility of iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband.
Merely if I were Google, I'd be identical concerned that all of my OEM tablet partners (including Acer) are on the verge of releasing touch-friendly Windows 8 hardware. As the Genus Acer W700 demonstrates, Windows 8 offers a successful tablet experience, and its productivity features show remarkable potential. A tweak here, an iteration there, and the Acer/Microsoft partnership might number into a down pat Windows 8 marriage.
Stay tuned for our final review of the Acer W700, which we'll hopefully post past in deep October or early November.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/461523/acer-w700-hands-on-our-first-serious-quality-time-with-a-windows-8-tablet.html
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