Sounds like I really dig Acer's W510, right? Well, the novelty of a fast, functional, x86-based tablet quickly wore off. The device's fit and finish just isn't up to the iPad's standard. There is some creaking and flexing that goes on, and yet Acer asks a premium price. Build quality simply doesn't match.
The Atom's PowerVR SGX545 is great for Web browsing and most Windows 8 applications. Games like Armed (a great turn-based strategy title), Pinball FX, and Angry Birds Star Wars also run well. You can even run classic PC games like Sam & Max. Unfortunately, more graphics-intensive titles, such as Violet Storm (a game inspired by Geometry Wars) don't run properly. The SGX545 is incompatible with XCOM: Enemy Unknown, resulting in a crash. There is always this jarring sensation going from a very fast tablet under the Windows 8 UI to unusably-slow 3D apps. This breaks the "it just works" paradigm tied to Apple's products.
Windows 8 also proved to be disappointing. Now, I have Windows 8 installed on my primary laptop, my home desktop, and my primary workstation, none of which have a touchscreen. Although there's a rough learning curve tied to the new UI, Windows 8 is a faster and more responsive operating system, given the same hardware I was using to drive Windows 7. But even though Windows 8 was envisioned as a desktop and tablet OS, you can tell it's still a desktop environment with touch optimizations.

You can live in the new Windows 8 UI until you can't. For a power user like myself, bouncing back and forth between the Windows 8 interface and the Desktop app is tolerable. And if you're a mainstream consumer using a tablet to check email, surf the Web, and play games like Angry Birds, you can live exclusively in the Windows 8 world. It’s the middle ground that becomes annoying. All of the sudden, instead of using the great IE interface, you're faced with a conventional desktop browser. And when you're forced to the Desktop on a tablet, control is far less elegant.
The more I tried to use the W510 as a tablet, the more problems surfaced. Traditional smartphone/tablet apps are missing in Windows 8. There's no alarm clock. While you can download alarm clock apps, none of them are as effective as what comes bundled in iOS. I’m not sure how this oversight made it past Microsoft. Free third-party alarm clock apps do not reliably wake up the tablet, and an unreliable alarm clock is a useless one.
During my time with the W510, I experienced a few crashes that required a power cycle. They weren't hard locks because Windows' animations were still moving. But the device was completely unresponsive to user input. I suspected an issue with Wi-Fi, since I also had trouble with Windows re-detecting the same access point as new. Even though the crashes only plagued me once a week or so, this is a flaw. During the same time, my Core i7-3770K-based desktop and Core i7-3930K-based workstation never crashed under Windows 8.
Originally, we wanted to publish this piece last December. Just before that, Acer released a BIOS update package that also included upgraded Intel drivers. This process went smoothly; there are not boot drives or firmware utilities to deal with. The update was as uneventful as what you'd expect from Apple. The new drivers were supposed to improve battery life, while maintaining performance. Gladly, I stopped encountering crashes after the software package was installed. Unfortunately, Wi-Fi remains spotty with my Linksys E4200 v1 router, and I have to reconnect to the AP manually after every restart.
You made a massive assumption here to save yourself a few bucks in shipping costs. Your assumption was wrong, and the delay in processing your RMA is all on you.
Acer manufactures and sells the dock together as a single unit. They separate physically but they are still both part of the same product. It is very reasonable and logical that they would want to examine both together in order to determine the cause of the problem.
It is not reasonable or logical to compare the Acer W510 dock to a keyboard or mouse for a Mac Pro. Keyboards and mice are not system specific and are highly interchangeable. Your Acer tablet may function without the dock, but the dock does not function without the tablet; it's a system dependent peripheral.
Next time you make an assumption that turns out to be wrong, I hope you'll accept some responsibility for it.
As if the whining about having to send the full unit in wasn't bad enough (anyone with any technical knowledge would know to send the complete system, instead of being miserly), but then bad English.
This was a really bad article.
a. this is a good tablet, much better than an ipad
b. it crashes if you try to do things that no ipad could ever do (full pc games)
c. customer service sucks
don't read the article, this has all the info
Chrome currently performs best in Octane. Nearly matched by Firefox. IE10 is nowhere near these two.
Either you took a busted Canary build, or there is something wrong with the test setup.
BTW, why are you testing a Canary build here ? Those are very unstable, and perf goes up and down.
Could you try the latest release Chrome and retest ?
a. this is a good tablet, much better than an ipad
b. it crashes if you try to do things that no ipad could ever do (full pc games)
c. customer service sucks
don't read the article, this has all the info
Plus -------- Acer needs him to pay the shipping charge!!!!!!!!
I have a 9 year old 1.7 GHz Single core Pentium M that can prove the same. Sunspider (0.91) score running Chrome (v24) was 544.6 +/- 6%. 1GB DDR RAM, Windows XP, Intel IGP. Don't remember the clocks.
Sunspider's sensitive to IPC and clock speeds, doesn't seem to care much about core count, as the rest of my little test went like this:
Core i7-3517U @ 2.4 GHz + Turbo = 208
Core 2 Quad Q8400 @ 2.77 GHz = 210.3
Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.4 GHz = 262.4
All within a 2% error margin.
Win 8
Win 7 HP
Mac OSX Snow Leopard
All x64.
Intel had sent me a Sony Vaio E14A and an XPS 12. Both touch enabled.
On the Sony, i only used metro to pass time (basically to try it out), otherwise i sat n the desktop...and to be honest, the additional $250 for a touchscreen didn't seem worth it. I did feel like poking at metro, so that's a win, probably, but the entire UI was so cut up...
You constantly had to juggle between both and...every time i'd want to click the start button, i'd freeze, remind myself what was going to happen, and then either avoid clicking or...well, click.
Charms are weird with the mouse. I finally figured why it's called the charms bar: you have to wave your cursor like a wand!
But yeah...it's just too cut up. Same for the XPS 12 in tablet mode. Had to keep going to the desktop for some odd thing, and touch is difficult there. There was also one time when the software keyboard didn't show up, i couldn't understand how to force it, so i had to resort to useing the old on-screen keyboard.
Did you notice how you can't reposition the text cursor by tap-and-holding? You have to use those arrow keys on the keyboard! WP8 is better, thankfully, though that lacks a file system and a decent music app (and a task manager, and a...)...
By biggest complaint with Dell ultrabooks is that they insist on blowing hot air into your lap. Total hybrid-ultrabook killer.
Didn't break 72*C under prime95 (any test) for 10 mins, holding 2.93 to 3 GHz. A core i7-3632QM is mean.
Sad it had Windows 8, touchscreen. It's funny, last year Windows 7 was awesome but OEM bloat and general designs were sub-standard. This year the trend seems to be reversing...
Why can't we edit comments anymore?
And please don't bring the new comments section to these articles!
p.s. Forgot to mention, was a good insight to what's going on behind the scenes at Intel. The only other person except you (Chris) that has writes stuff like this is Anand Shimpi. Real World Tech's David Kanter seems to know a lot about stuff like this too. Of course i'm sure i'm missing a lot of people though!
p.p.s. I wish Intel and AMD would team up to crack mobile. Some sort of agreement that lets them split profits/market share, say 55-45 or something. Not happening, i know
Yeah not the assumption i'd make either (shipping the stuff separately), but you can't really say "who is this guy" on this article.
Unless you're new, in which case you're partially forgiven. Partially.
1. Anything that can be done on a CISC instruction set can be done on a RISC instruction set, it just takes more instructions. Intel's microcode is RISC not CISC. Why? because it's a hell of a lot easier to optimize. It's clear Chris doesn't have a clue as to what this means or why this ties into ARM vs Intel x86
2. Intel didn't optimize their architecture for performance, they just move more of the work onto the CPU
3. Intel worked optimizing schedulers and hardware interfaces for x86, a laudable goal but the same optimizations can easily be applied to ARM
4. Aside from the Windows RT tablet the benchmarks are significantly different systems, not particularly useful
5. The rant is more of a service issue than a hardware issue, important yes but has no bearing on the article other than a broken keyboard
And most importantly
6. The title is misleading, there is no head to head against ARM or Apple. It's optimizations Intel has made to make things work better
Legacy, huh?
Yes, legacy support. Windows 8 programming is meant to be done in Metro, but the desktop supports old software that doesn't work in Metro.
Whether you prefer legacy software or not is up to you, but that doesn't change what it is.