Gadgetory

I'm Dan Ackerman and we are here taking a first look at the Acer Iconia W 510 this may look like a small clamshell laptop but it's actually something you're gonna be seeing a lot more of with Windows 8 a hybrid laptop and that means that the display here besides being a touch display like that actually separates completely from the rest of the system and you can carry this around like a tablet you know just like any other tablet it's got an accelerometer in it so you can rotate it and screen orientation changes you know it's fairly thin fairly light it's got that edge to edge glass over the top so by itself it just looks and feels like a regular tablet then you can snap it into the base here and you have something that's much closer to a traditional laptop now all the components are inside the screen here including the CPU what you have on the bottom half is of course a keyboard a touchpad and an additional battery so the two can work together and give you a really extended battery life now the concepts pretty cool I've got two things that are giving me pause about both the W 510 and a lot of the other upcoming Windows 8 hybrids that we've seen number one is this system instead of having an Intel Core i3 or Core i5 processor it's got the next version of Intel's Atom processor that's the low power CPU we used to see in netbooks a couple years ago people kind of fell out of love with those four so to bring the atom back and put it in something like a cabin that really needs a little bit of processing overhead for the touchscreen and all the other cool stuff that Windows 8 does you know makes me a little bit worried about performance although the new atoms are definitely better than the ones in netbooks I'm a couple years ago number two is price you know what they're asking for this particular combination and this is very similar to a lot of other windows 8 hybrid laptops is 750 dollars and that's for the tablet screen part and the keyboard you can get this alone for about $600 you know when you consider that this is an atom powered thing and most atom powered laptops from years ago cost maybe $300 at most 750 does seem like kind of a lot especially when you consider what kind of really cool Ultrabook you can actually get with $700 now you can get a pretty good one I'm just saying you know that being said as a tablet those things works great the keyboard I found that keeps her very shallow I missed a lot of kids while typing it's not really the best keyboard experience and it is a little bit awkward when you put the two parts together it looks like a clamshell laptop but not the previous one you've ever seen so there's really a lot to at eight they take into consideration here if you are considering a hybrid laptop I'm Dan Ackerman and that is the Acer Iconia W 510