Acer Iconia W700 Preview

Acer’s Iconia W700 is the first Windows 8 tablet to grace PC Pro’s labs. The real surprise is the price: for just Rs 76,999, the Iconia W700 packs in an 11.6in Full HD touch screen, a Core i3 processor and somehow finds room in the budget for a case, a docking station and a Bluetooth keyboard.

The Acer Iconia W700 is something different. It’s a tablet with a laptop-class processor and a docking station that lets you use the system like a desktop.

Just place it on a desk and work as if you were using a full-fledged laptop or desktop. You can even plug in an external display if you want a larger monitor.

The idea is that you keep the dock and keyboard at work or in your home, and use it like a full PC.

The added HDMI means you can connect it to an external monitor so you’d have no idea you were using a tablet at all. When you leave, just pull the tablet out from the dock, for games, apps and browsing on the move.

The tablet itself weighs about 2 pounds and appears to get roughly all-day battery life of around 7 hours or so. That gives it better battery life than most laptops, but it falls a bit short of what you’d expect from an iPad or high-end Android tablet. Still, it’s pretty impressive for a tablet with a laptop chip and laptop-class performance.

Acer’s Iconia W700 is a reasonable attempt at a consumer Windows 8 tablet, and it’s keenly priced.

On the move, the lack of a docking keyboard makes it far less usable than many rival tablets or hybrid devices, and the absence of active stylus support hinders its appeal as a dedicated tablet. Still, for the price and the features involved, this tablet is a steal, available at Shophive.com.