Acer Iconia Tab W500 review

“PC or tablet? Choose both,” begins Acer’s description of its Iconia Tab W500, before going on to call its dual-function design “the best of both worlds”. The first of those two quotes is technically correct, but you’d have to be very new to mobile computing to come away agreeing with the second.

It isn’t that the concept is a bad one. The W500 is made up of two distinct elements: the 10.1in Windows 7 tablet and the removable keyboard dock, cleverly designed to fit perfectly together into the shape of a netbook when closed for carrying. A small latch on the front edge of the keyboard holds the two parts together like a traditional laptop lid, and as a whole it feels about as thick and weighty as a netbook from a year or two ago – a small price to pay for such flexibility.

Flip the latch, however, and rather than opening upwards like a laptop, the two segments simply come apart in your hands – a surprise that caused panicked fumbles as we handed it to unwitting test subjects. Instead, to make the necessary connection you have to open the flap behind the keyboard and slot the tablet into the USB dock that emerges.

In that mode, it functions much like any netbook. The base has a USB 2 port on either edge, along with an Ethernet socket for when you’re at your desk. To make room for the dock, the keyboard has shifted forward towards the user, occupying the space where once would have been a wristrest and trackpad. Instead you get a perfectly usable trackpoint, along with some rather skinny mouse buttons on the front edge. If your experience matches ours, you may find yourself clicking the space bar by mistake until you get used to the cramped layout.

It also performs much like a netbook. It has 2GB of RAM and an AMD C-50 processor, which unfortunately meant it aped the recent Toshiba NB550D in refusing to install Sony Vegas Pro 10. Disabling that element of our benchmarks, performance was almost identical to the Toshiba, putting it a shade behind an Atom netbook in everyday applications but quicker in media tasks. It also coped with the TrackMania Nations Forever 3D benchmark relatively well, averaging 18fps at Medium quality settings and the screen’s native 1,280 x 800 resolution. Finally, the battery gave us 5hrs 8mins of light use – distinctly average by netbook standards.

Whatever you do, when you’re finished working or playing, don’t close the W500 like you would a netbook. It’s an instinctive move that every one of us in the Labs tried to make, yet doing so causes the docking connector to warp and buckle, to the point where our sample – which had admittedly endured a launch day of journalists doing exactly that before it reached us – was beginning to break. Sure, you’ll quickly learn not to do it, but allowing such an obvious motion to threaten the most vital part of the base is a serious design error.

Instead, pull it out of its dock and you can get to know it in its tablet mode. Alas, it’s a similar experience to every other Windows 7 tablet we’ve tested, which is to say it’s immensely frustrating. Acer has done its best to ease the pain by installing its own “Acer Ring”, which gives access to a basic touch browser; a Facebook, YouTube and Flickr aggregator; a web-clipping tool; and Acer’s Clear.fi media streaming utility – all of which work only in landscape mode. It’s functional for basic tasks, but hardly a replacement for an app store.

The screen is decent enough, with even brightness and good viewing angles, and the tablet has front and rear 1.3-megapixel webcams. When held in landscape mode, the power connector sits at the bottom of the right edge, and a volume rocker, the “on” switch, an HDMI port and a headphone jack on the left edge. The bottom edge has a second USB 2 port to complement the one that makes up the docking connector, along with a rotation lock.

The handheld itself feels sturdy, but the greatest disappointment about the Acer Iconia Tab W500 is that it’s so unwieldy in whichever mode you use it. As a netbook, the weight imbalance between the two segments makes it top-heavy, the screen angle can’t be adjusted, and the lack of robustness in the design of the keyboard dock concerns us for the long run. Plus, the mere 32GB of internal storage leaves it miles behind its netbook rivals. As a tablet, for the most part you’re left doing the usual irritable poking around in a hopelessly unsuitable operating system, and on a device that’s a good inch-and-a-half longer and 336g heavier than an iPad 2.

The final comedown is the price. Acer is charging a massive £530 inc VAT for this hybrid, or £450 for the weighty tablet alone. To put that into context, an equivalent AMD netbook costs £300, an iPad 2 £399, and Dell’s Inspiron Duo netbook/tablet hybrid – which had the same software weaknesses, but did a better job on the hardware – can be had for £450. We applaud Acer for trying to innovate, and with a redesign this concept could be made to work, but as it stands the Iconia Tab W500 offers the worst, rather than the best, of both worlds.

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