The Acer W510 tablet is a great Windows 8 option when traveling

 

If you are looking for a full Windows 8 tablet and need it to be light weight and have great battery life, a good choice to look for is the Acer W510. The Acer W510 runs the new Atom Z2760 dual-core processor. This is much better than the previous Atom processor that was in what we all new from the Netbook era.

Every year I head out to CES in Las Vegas, I try to lighting my load and this year was no exception. As you can see I decided to bring along my Galaxy Note II best 5.5-inch phone in my opinion, the Samsung Smart PC ATIV 700T for heavy video editing and the Acer W510. Yes the Acer W510.

The Samsung Smart PC ATIV 700T stayed at the hotel room as I wouldn't be using it during the day because my plan was to use and carry the Acer W510 to have the ability to connect back to the office, run full Office for work related Word documents and a few Excel worksheets that just don't work with iOS or Android tablets well. The advantage of the new Atom processor also known as the Clover Trail is the great battery life and the ability to have always on connection. Once you have used a Atom Clover Trail Hybrid Tablet and get the feel for always on and instant on, you want your current PC to have that great ability as well. All email and any calendar items show up as soon as they are pushed on the welcome screen. If you use Skype it can run in the background with the screen off and get your messages with very low power drain. Then you can press the "On" button to quickly glance at any notifications you might have. Sure your mobile phone is the same, but just having the ability on the computer is a plus.

The Atom Clover Trail processor is capable of editing quick videos you might have, normally anything that I at least I have experience is, anything like 4 to 5 minutes video would give you decent rendering time. Here I used the Acer W510 to video record the Galaxy Note II and the Galaxy SIII. The Acer W510 8MP video camera was able to capture decent video quality.

On the show floor I could carry the Acer W510 in my hand when I was replying to emails, had to log in remotely a few times and the 10.1-inch display was a prefect size to achieve this type of work on the go. Acer was one of the first to release a full Windows 8 10.1-inch tablet and is one of the lightest full Windows 8 tablet as well. This made it much easier to read or catch up on what was happening at CES Show as well. I could instantly turn on the Acer W510 and read my RSS feeds using Nextgen Reader, this has become my favorite and excellent reader. If you are running Windows 8, you might want to try it for yourself.

Normally I would always worried about bringing a charger when using my laptop. Well with the new Atom Clover Trail processor I have learned that I don't even think about the charger. That's how well and efficient the new Atom Clover Trail processor is. Sure your not going to be able to run latest games, 2,000 page word document or that very complex Excel worksheet. The point is you can run full Windows 8 with ability to run Winodws applications along with the new metro apps. With the Acer W510 I went through the whole day at CES Show using it constantly and still would have 55% battery life, enough to do some work after dinner at the restaurant. If you manage to purchase the keyboard dock which has a built-battery, you can get up too 19 hours of on the go mobile computing. Now that's some serious battery life! This is a reason I didn't really mind just to carry my Stoweaway Bluetooth keyboard and a very light weight stand to prop the Acer W510 to punch out my work stuff after dinner.

I have been averaging around 8 to 10 hours of battery life with just the Acer W510 tablet. This is pretty much a few hours less or at times depending what applications I am running on my Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet that I get.

On the show floor the on screen keyboard worked great. In portrait with the 10.1-inch display, the on screen keyboard was excellent to use, even in landscape mode it worked better than the Samsung Smart PC Pro 700T and Samsung Smart PC 500T because these are 11.6-inch display and much wider. Not that it is bad on these 11.6-inch device but you can see that it is easier to reach across with the smaller screen.

As you can see the Acer W510 is more than capable to be your next portable tablet and give you the opportunity to run your Windows application with outstanding battery life and great performance with the Atom Clover Trail processor. Everything is very snappy, sure if you want to run Photoshop or edit a video with lots of transition you wouldn't want to be doing this on a Atom processor anyways.

Speakers are load enough to be able to hear music or watch movies on the Acer W510. The speakers are located on the side of the tablet so the sound really sounds pretty good for such a small device. Don't expect to hear the sound in a very noisy room, I did turn up the sound while at the CES Show and was able to lightly hear some music.

For price value, you can basically pickup a Acer W510 Atom Clover Trail tablet for about $399 with a 32GB SSD, or $599 with a 64GB SSD. This might sway some tablet shoppers if the word gets out, but then if your needs are more iOS or Android app geared then this might not look so appealing.

Specs you find in these new Atom Clover Trail tablets are pretty much the same so it will be a matter of what tablet design you like, or in some cases like the Samsung Smart PC, Asus VivoTab TF810C and the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2, it comes with a Wacom digitizer for ability to use a stylus to take notes.

• 10.1-inch display
• 1366 x 768 pixels 155 ppi
• Capacitive 5 point mult-touch
• Atom Dual-core 1.5MHz / 1.8MHz max
• SGX545 VR @ 533MHz
• 2GB RAM Dual-channel 800MHz LPDDR2
• 32GB or 64GB SSD eMMC Storage
• MicroSD up to 64GB
• 8MP Rear camera Auto focus
• 1920 x 1080p HD
• 2MP front facing camera
• Stereo speakers
• Bluetooth
• NFC
• 802.11 a/b/g/n
• Micro USB
• Micro HDMI
• Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Compass
• 10.18 x 6.60 x 0.35
• 1.27 lbs

 I see by the time CES 2014 rolls around, we should see the new higher performance from Haswell processors that will give us better battery life and the always on connection that we are seeing with Atom processors. With that in mind, it seems that every year I reduce my load by one computer, so here is hoping that I will just need to carry one hybrid tablet and maybe my iPad Mini or Galaxy Note 8 to the next CES Show.