Review: Acer Iconia W3 - Windows 8 on a tiny tablet

Acer's offering is small enough, but is it perfectly formed?

Brandished on stage at Microsoft's Build conference last week by Steve Ballmer himself as the next great thing in Windows 8 tablet hardware, Acer's Iconia W3 is the first 8-in tablet with the ability to run the full version of the company's latest OS, rather than falling back on the ARM-based Windows RT.

This theoretically crams all the advantages of a desktop PC into a compact tablet, and in fairness to the W3, a fair amount of those benefits do shine through.

On the other hand, while £279 seems a bargain for a small, yet fully functional Windows 8 tablet, users will more or less get what they pay for in terms of the realistic usability of such a scaled-down Windows 8 experience.

To get the specs out of the way, the W3 sports an 8-in WXGA multi-touch LCD screen, powered by Intel's Atom Z2769 processor, and runs the 32-bit edition of Windows 8.

It has 2GB of RAM onboard, with 64GB of storage space, and fore and aft cameras for video conferencing and photography.

As specs go, these are fairly respectable for the money, even if the overall build quality of the tablet's shell suffers from Acer's customary cheap and cheerful approach.

But compared to, say, Google's heavily-subsidised Nexus 7, this is a significantly more powerful offering, especially when you factor in the Windows 8 licence cost.

However, with the stock Windows 8 installation (bear in mind we also installed the Windows 8.1 preview build as well) taking up 49GB of the drive, this leaves only 32.1GB left for your own data. The W3's Micro SD slot supports a further 32GB external storage too, though.

Drive space will probably be of little concern in the long run, anyway, because this tablet feels unlikely to become anybody's workhorse ‘road warrior' device.

Bluntly, the W3 is just too small for any serious Windows 8 use. With a choice of only two screen resolutions - native 1280 x 800 and the OS's minimum supported 1024 x 768 - trying to use the Windows 8 desktop mode quickly becomes a bind on a visual and interactive level.

Such a high resolution on such a small device makes touchscreen use a hit and miss affair, not to mention successfully reading any icon or taskbar labels in desktop mode. While increasing font sizes helps, picking out options on the taskbar or even successfully tapping icons can be taxing, and you'll often find yourself giving up and quitting back to the Modern UI, queuing up your most-used apps as Charms on there. That's probably the way Microsoft wants it anyway, of course.

There's no native stylus support either, so while Surface Pro's big, clear screen also enjoys pinpoint Wacom accuracy, the W3 is all-too reliant on fingertips that are just too big and clumsy.

While using most Modern apps and general web browsing is straightforward, enterprise users will find the pokiness of the desktop mode a real disadvantage.

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Review: Acer Iconia W3 - Windows 8 on a tiny tablet

Acer's offering is small enough, but is it perfectly formed?

We checked with Microsoft while out at Build last week, and there is apparently no intention of introducing any lower screen resolutions than 1024 x 768 to Windows 8.1, so it's not just the W3 that will face these kinds of problems in the 8-in or smaller market that Microsoft seems so keen to pitch now.

Even for a tablet at the cheaper end of the market, the W3's reflective, smudgy and contrast-shifting display is a surprising throwback to a much darker (literally) age of tablets.

While arguably slightly better in portrait mode - which could be Acer's desired orientation for this tab - no matter how you hold or tilt the screen, the right side suffers from darkness and colour loss, and there's an often unacceptable level of reflection from surrounding light sources bouncing off the screen.

Maximum brightness setting is pretty much mandatory to see anything outside a completely dark room, which isn't the best news for battery life. In addition, it's almost impossible to view the screen properly from anywhere but a dead-on facing angle, meaning sharing slideshows and photos with colleagues is a challenge.

There are other oddities, too: our attempts to use the camera app out of the box resulted in the message "To get started connect a camera", while attempts to run a few pieces of games software resulted in graphical glitching seemingly brought about by the GPU layering background windows on top of the foreground session. Although again, please bear mind we were running Windows 8.1 preview (at Microsoft's keen invitation, we might add) when these issues took place.

It's also surprisingly heavy for such a tiny device. Heft it next to a Nexus 7 or, worse, an iPad Mini, and it doesn't feel like the kind of thing you could slip into a briefcase next to your lunch without feeling the strain.

Still, the W3's dark screen and smudgy fine details have their advantage; Acer reckons the battery life of the W3 is eight hours and, while it didn't quite manage to live up to that, it wasn't far short for general, word processor-based use.

Kick activity up into videos or high-end gaming (which the W3 is pretty good at, running Half-Life 2 surprisingly well) and depreciation is considerably faster, but we got a lot more out of the W3 in this regard than the Surface Pro, which is just so over-specced for its size and battery capacity that anything visually taxing cuts through its charge in sometimes as little as an hour.

For an extra $79.99, meanwhile (UK price TBA), you can pick up the W3's specially-designed accompanying keyboard. Unfortunately, it's ugly, plasticky and feels decidedly cheaper than even the bargain-basement engineering of the tablet itself. It's also not a dock in the true sense, but more a simple Bluetooth device with a rubberised groove cut into it in which the tablet stands at a slight angle.

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Review: Acer Iconia W3 - Windows 8 on a tiny tablet

Acer's offering is small enough, but is it perfectly formed?

Still, once its two triple-A batteries have been installed and it's synched nice and easily with the tab, it proves a sturdy and reliable enough keyboard that resyncs instantly the moment it's turned back on. The W3 can also be stowed on the underside of the keyboard, though the thicker, heavier tablet protrudes in an ugly, vaguely ridiculous way with shades of a school child's design and technology project. The clips that house it are unlikely to last very long before wearing down. There are many cheaper and superior offerings available, though you'd need to buy a separate stand as well, as there's no kickstand on the W3.

Overall, the Acer W3 is a tough judgement call. On the one hand, it doesn't do anything particularly wrong. Hardy - if cheap-looking - fast and reliable for day to day tasks, it's no slouch as a full-featured Windows desktop machine. Unfortunately, the size of the device coupled with the disappointing screen quality are two major strikes against a legitimate use case.

Docking to a monitor through its mini HDMI port is a tactic, of course, but purchasing something slightly larger would provide a device with fewer such glaring shortcomings.

While we previously said storage space may not be such a factor, the certainty of newer Windows 8 updates in the future may also see the scant 64GB SSD shrink to problematic levels, too.

To conclude, the Acer Iconia W3 is a worthy first experiment in porting Windows 8 to the small tablet market, but has skimped just a little too much on materials quality to make it a must-buy. As it stands, it may be suited better to those who desperately lack space for a desktop, and aren't likely to want to use the machine for long periods.

Still, Acer's effort is a tantalising glimpse into a potentially exciting new world for Windows 8 in the small tablet market. Your move, Lenovo. Or perhaps Microsoft would like to have a go itself? Surface Mini, anyone...?

Rating: 2/5