Acer Iconia Tab W500

My last couple of posts have been made from my new Iconia Tab W500.  Too many evenings have had me sitting on the sofa hunched over a laptop, whilst my wife looks much more relaxed with her iPad.  I'd get an iPad myself - they are brilliant - but you can't program on them, so that is a deal breaker for me.  The Iconia Tab W500 tries to be a laptop and a tablet:



When in tablet mode it is not as good as the iPad.  The touchscreen pointer does not seem as accurate and you're left feeling that Windows 7 wasn't designed with tablets in mind.  The on-screen keyboard (which is a special version for this machine, not the standard Windows 7 version) is better than on the iPad ... but the less accurate pointer means that you get the wrong key sometimes.  Battery life seems OK when compared to other laptops - I have taken notes on it all day (with careful use of the screen brightness control) and still had some power left.  When I got the machine I did a BIOS update which seemed to make the battery life much better though.



But ... you can run Visual Studio 2010 on it - so it scores bonus points there for me.  All-in-all I'm quite happy with it, it does what I wanted it to.  Perhaps there will be better Windows based tablets to follow.