Acer Iconia Tab W500P-BZ841

The Acer Iconia Tab W500 works in several potentially good ideas, undone by half-baked physical design that makes it needlessly frustrating to use.
Review:

Windows tablets have been around for years, in the form of slates and convertible laptops with touch-screen lids that rotate and fold down over the keyboard. To date, many of these have been disappointing, largely because they failed on either the software or hardware fronts, or both. The Windows OS is simply not designed for fingertip (or even stylus) input, and the CPUs used to power most Windows tablets have been so underpowered as to make these devices mostly useless.

Stepping into the ring following the launch of Apple's second-generation iPad is the Acer Iconia Tab W500 . Similar to ... Expand full review

Windows tablets have been around for years, in the form of slates and convertible laptops with touch-screen lids that rotate and fold down over the keyboard. To date, many of these have been disappointing, largely because they failed on either the software or hardware fronts, or both. The Windows OS is simply not designed for fingertip (or even stylus) input, and the CPUs used to power most Windows tablets have been so underpowered as to make these devices mostly useless.

Stepping into the ring following the launch of Apple's second-generation iPad is the Acer Iconia Tab W500 . Similar to Lenovo's (still MIA U1) Hybrid and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, the 10.1-inch W500 consists of a touch-screen slate and a separate keyboard dock. When combined, the two halves form something close to a traditional laptop. The W500 is $549 with Windows 7 Home Premium, or $619 with Windows 7 Professional. Both versions have 2GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD. (Acer also makes a keyboard-less Android version, called the Iconia A500.)

In the case of the Acer W500, we saw a lot of potentially good ideas, but the overall effect was undone by half-baked physical design. After struggling with docking, undocking, and folding down the W500, it's clear that if any designer at Apple presented this product in its current form to Steve Jobs, they'd quickly find themselves reassigned as the night janitor at an Apple store in Siberia.