Acer Iconia W700-6465

The Acer Iconia W700-6465 ($999.99 list) is a Windows 8 slate tablet, eschewing the traditional keyboard and clamshell design in favor of a screen-only form factor for enhanced mobility. Now, there have been Windows slate tablets in the past, like the Motion Computing M1400, and we've seen many tablets that failed to garner customer interest due to the mediocre Windows XP Tablet OS and subsequent follow-ups in Vista and Windows 7. The W700, one of the first Windows 8 slate tablets, shows some of the true potential of the Windows 8 interface. Though the W700 comes with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard, it's really meant to be used as a tablet for the person who has to do work around the house, a college campus, or on the job. It's certainly capable of all that, though you may make a couple of sacrifices in performance in return for that portability. It's one of the best arguments for a first-generation Windows 8 slate tablet, and as such it earns our first Editor's Choice for Windows 8 Slate Tablets.

Design and Features
The W700 measures about 0.5 by 11.75 by 7.75 inches (HWD), which is somewhat large for a tablet, but noticeably smaller than a thin ultrabook or a convertible tablet PC like the Sony VAIO Duo 11 or the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13. The W700 is a unibody slate tablet, with all the components built into a hollowed-out slab of aluminum. With its Gorilla Glass 2 screen, the W700 feels sturdy in the hand, with a decent weight of just over two pounds (2.02 pounds). Since the chassis has to accommodate an 11.6-inch, 16:9 widescreen, the W700 is a little wider than tablets like the Apple iPad. The W700 is easy to use two-handed, but hold it in one hand and it may feel a bit long and bulky when maneuvering around your home or office. It comes with a leatherette case with a screen cover that flips over to create a stand for watching videos or typing on the tablet screen. It's a nice bonus, though the case adds a whole pound to the system's travel weight.

The tablet comes with a lightweight docking cradle, which effectively turns the system into an 11-inch desktop PC. The docking cradle passes power through, so you don't have to plug the AC adapter into the tablet every time you recharge. The cradle also acts as a USB 3.0 hub, multiplying the tablet's single USB 3.0 port into three USB 3.0 ports on the side of the cradle.

While the system is in the cradle, the headset jack on the right had side of the tablet is still accessible. The back of the cradle has a removable stand, which can be reoriented so the tablet is either vertical (good for using the keyboard and group viewing) or horizontal (better for typing and tapping on the screen). You can also manhandle the cradle to a portrait mode, so you can view Web pages easier. The built-in accelerometer makes sure everything is right side up during use. The cradle has pass through vents for the W700's stereo speakers.

The W700 comes with a 1,920-by-1,080 resolution IPS panel, which makes it ideal for viewing online videos. It's also large and wide enough to keep several programs running at once for multitasking. Videos in 1080p HD look and sound great, whether they downloaded or streaming. We watched webisodes of Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome as well as the original BSG episodes on Netflix, and both looked great.

The built-in speakers with Dolby Home Theater v4 have enough oomph to fill a small room, which is certainly enough to keep a few people happy while watching a movie or while listening to music. The 1080p screen has a couple of drawbacks: unless you set the zoom setting higher than default, text can look tiny in both Internet Explorer as well as any program that you open in Window 8's desktop mode. It can also take a little practice to touch close boxes and other UI elements when they are only a few millimeters tall. That said, after a few hours with the unit you'll figure out how much pressure to use to tap on onscreen elements. You can use capacitive styli, but graphics artists and engineers won't be able to use the Wacom-style pressure-sensitive digitizer styli they use with their professional tablets.

The W700 comes with an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, Intel HD Graphics 4000, and a 128GB SSD. This is a more robust configuration than Windows RT tablets like the Microsoft Surface with Windows RT, which uses a power-saving ARM processor instead of an ultrabook-class Core i5. You'll be able to do tasks that you'd expect to do on a regular laptop, including photo editing and video transcoding (see performance below).

The system's solid-state drive (SSD) comes with a few pre-installed programs, including Netflix, eBay, Evernote, and Amazon Kindle, among others. While the extra programs look fine in the Windows 8 Start screen, their icons clutter up the desktop mode view somewhat. Thankfully these icons can be removed without too much trouble. If you wish, you can completely remove these programs to recover some of the space on the SSD. The Acer Explorer program is a place to get updates, view tutorials, and a place to find out about the pre-installed programs. The Windows store in the Start screen is a place to find more programs, but you can install most Windows compatible programs on the W700. The W700 comes with a one-year warranty.

Performance
The Iconia W700-6465 comes with a familiar Intel Core i5-3317U processor, found in many ultrabooks, Intel HD Graphics 4000, 4GB of memory, 128GB SSD, and 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. This makes the W700 competitive with ultrabooks and other convertible tablets on our benchmark tests. For example, the W700 is faster on PCMark 7 than ultrabooks like the HP Envy 4-1043cl and Lenovo IdeaPad U310, because the W700's SSD makes it faster overall than these hard drive-equipped ultrabooks. However, the tighter confines inside the chassis and more limited cooling of the slate form factor keep the W700 behind on our 3D and video encoding benchmark test. From the benchmark numbers, we surmise that the W700 reaches its limits a bit quicker than other, roomier laptops and ultrabooks. This isn't a deal breaker for the most part, since you're more likely to work on your full-sized desktop when you need to do serious photo or video editing.

The W700's battery life was very good, lasting over six and a half hours on our battery rundown test. It's not quite "full day," but you should be able to make the system last longer if you take breaks and let it go to sleep when you're not using it. The Dell XPS 12 (5:09) and the Sony VAIO 11 (3:09) weren't able to match the W700.

The Acer Iconia W700-6465 lies somewhere between slate tablets with mobile operating systems, like the iPad, and Windows 8 convertible ultrabooks, like the Dell XPS 12 or Sony VAIO Duo 11. The W700 is certainly more capable than less Windows RT tablets like the Microsoft Surface with Windows RT or the Asus Vivo Tab RT. The W700 is sure to appeal to businesses that already use Windows XP or Windows 7 tablets, like retail, healthcare, and information gathering organizations, but it will also appeal to end users who want a really portable PC that can do more work than the Android-based or iOS-based tablet they've been carting around. It's also an effective laptop replacement for people that retrieve information around the house or on the road. It's a great place to start and a benchmark to compare against, so the Acer Iconia W700-6465 is our first Editors' Choice winner in the category of Windows 8 slate tablets.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS

COMPARISON TABLE
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