Our main complaint

Our main complaint

Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Dell Ac Adapter

Another neat trick is the Iconia’s battery life. Despite running a full-blown version of Windows 8, despite weighing just 580 grams, it’s got an advertised battery life of nine hours – something that’s only possible with the low-powered Atom chip. In our tests, which involved playing a one-minute HD video over and over, we got pretty close to that: eight hours 36 minutes on a charge.

What’s more, the Iconia W510 comes with another battery inside its keyboard, the same size as its main battery, so when the keyboard and the tablet are used together you get a whopping 17 or 18 hours of continual usage, something you could never get with a tablet running a full-blown Intel Core chip, and would only rarely get on a tablet running an ARM chip. And Acer has cleverly designed the Iconia so it drains the keyboard battery first, meaning you could use it all day as a laptop, detach the keyboard and still have eight or nine hours’ use.

The new Atom is in the same performance ballpark as an ARM with battery like Dell 1691P Ac Adapter, Dell 5081P Ac Adapter, Dell 75UYF Ac Adapter, Dell 851UY Ac Adapter, Dell 312-3250 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 2500 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 8100 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude C540 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude C640 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude CPX Ac Adapter, Dell Precision M50 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude C840 Ac Adapter chip (Internet Explorer averaged 916 points in our BrowserMark 2.0 test, roughly the same as the 923 points averaged by IE on an ARM-based Surface tablet), but it isn’t a patch on the Intel Core chips that usually run Windows 8 convertibles. IE on a Core i5 convertible laptop/tablet averaged 2316 points in our tests, more than double the Atom, and our other tests showed a similarly yawning performance gap. Our audio conversion test took 510 seconds to complete (161 seconds on the Core i5) and our video conversion test took 1372 seconds, compared with 274 seconds on the Core i5.

For day-to-day tablet-style usage, the Iconia feels perfectly speedy, but when you fire up heavy-duty Windows apps, its Atom underpinnings show and it’s anything but fast.

The graphics on the Iconia are quite limited, too. It’s got a screen resolution of 1366 x 768, which for some reason (possibly related to the Atom’s inability to scale to other resolutions) caused a number of apps, such as Spotify and our 3D-testing app, to either look very dodgy (Spotify runs with chunky fonts) or to run in a limited way (our 3D app). Microsoft recommends a minimum vertical resolution of 960 pixels for Windows 8 and we wish Acer had listened.

Our main complaint with the Iconia has nothing to do with its Atom chip, however. It’s the trackpad. The keyboard is quite OK to type on – I’ve written this with no complaints – but the trackpad is terrible! You can’t even drag and drop properly with it, it’s so poorly designed. If you get a W510, be sure to get a separate mouse to use with it, too. A Mighty Mouse, perhaps.

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill afford to own.