Acer ICONIA TAB W500 Pro Reviews

The Acer Iconia Tab W500 is great for someone who wants the familiarity of Windows, or who wants to do Windows-based work occasionally. It excels at audio and video playback, but you'll need an SD Card to store that media on because it has limited built-in storage. This tablet is faster than an average netbook, and you can remove the screen and use it as a responsive touch tablet. The main drawbacks are the bulk that comes with the hardware requirements of Windows, and the battery life that is more in line with a regular laptop than with what we've come to expect from ARM-based tablets.

There’s nothing exactly revolutionary about the W500, but it does more than your average Windows netboook and can do it in tablet form. Sure it’s a little on the chunky side and Windows 7 isn’t as finger friendly as iOS or Android, but with the dock or without it’s still a proper computer rather than a steroid-injected smartphone with ideas above its station.

The Acer Iconia Tab W500-BZ467 has the best Windows experience we've seen on a tablet, thanks to its docking keyboard. Lose that and the Iconia Tab loses a lot of its appeal.

The Acer Iconia Tab W500 is baffling. It tries to bridge the gap between full notebooks – which Acer makes well – and tablets, and fails at both.

The Acer ICONIA Tab is a good idea. But with a price way that's way more than you'd expect to pay for a netbook with similar specifications, it's simply over-priced and under-featured.

The Windows OS and solid performance aren’t enough to make up for this tablet’s slow-loading apps, poor battery life, heft, and high price tag.

Ultimately, almost 600 euros is a fair price when you are aware of the drawbacks and advantages of the Acer Iconia Tab W500, and if you don't fear investing a bit of work in the configuration and software extension.

With a large proportion of corporate customers, we can see why Acer decided to take a punt on a Windows-based tablet. Unfortunately, a desktop OS just doesn’t cut the mustard here, and bolting on a keyboard only makes matters worse. Look to an Android tablet instead or choose a low-cost laptop if Windows is what you need.

The Acer Iconia Tab W500 works in several potentially good ideas, undone by half-baked physical design that makes it needlessly frustrating to use.

The Iconia Tab W500 wants to be the best of both worlds; in the end it's one of the nicest Windows tablets we've seen so far (barring the small size of the on-screen keyboard) and that's both praise and complaint. Windows 7 does do touch pretty well, but it's always going to be an afterthought for all but a few apps. There's a lot you can do well with touch on Windows, from browsing to playing all of your media (especially in Windows Media Center which works as well for fingers as it does for a remote control). It's the other apps that you want Windows for in the first place that don't always work well enough with touch. You have the keyboard as a fallback, but that's not quite ergonomic enough to really make this the perfect combo. But if you have a tablet PC with a swivelling keyboard that you long to be able to rip off (and you already know what compromises you'll be making), you'll love the Tab.

The Acer Iconia W500 is a device that does the tablet cause no good. The keyboard dock is clumsily implemented but without it, using Windows 7 becomes a chore. After a few more passes from Acer's design bods it could have been closer to a winner, but as is it's too bulky to beat rival Android tablets and not convenient enough to worry ultra-portable laptops.

A poorly executed and expensive attempt to create a hybrid of two popular form factors

The problem for Acer is its choice of operating system - Windows 7 wasn't designed for use on a tablet, and it really shows. You only need look at a tablet running Android or an iPad running iOS to see how it should be done - and it's nothing like this. We understand the sentiment, but if you need this level of compatibility, you should really be using a notebook, or a desktop and uploading your files onto a cheaper, more usable tablet than this.