Screen On!
Once we fire it up, we're greeted with a gorgeous 1920x1080 IPS panel, with fantastic viewing angles (which are obviously somewhat offset by the very glossy screen) and a bright backlight.
Acer have installed a "few" applications, most of which are apps from the W8 Store, but also bundled is a McAffee trial, which instantly (first boot up) told me that it had expired or something and that I was unprotected. One MSE activation and an uninstallation later and that was fixed
. There were also games and things installed, but all were painless to remove, the only large application being the camera profile application which was well over 250MB, but I can't figure the purpose of. They did have a Microsoft Office trial and Skype installed too.
Before W8 was released, and I tried the RP on my desktop, I had wondered what the hell they were doing. Now I'm running full W8 on my desktop, and I'm used to some of the little quirks, and generally find it a pleasant experience (the improvements to Explorer are great), so I was eager to see what it was like on its intended platform.
Any app (from the Store, program or application for the desktop please!) has very tight touch control, and the apps I found somewhat pointless or space wasting on my desktop, turned out pretty nice on this. The stock Weather, Email and Maps apps are very nice to use with a touch interface - just like Windows Phone, or another tablet OS.
It gets slightly more complex with programs. I installed Maxthon 4, which is my favourite browser (cloud shares favourites, passwords, history and so on between computers, and also has mobile equivalents (though not WP8 yet)) as it uses both Internet Explorer's rendering engine (Trident) and Chrome's rendering engine (Webkit), allowing the user to switch if one has a bit of a fit. It also sandboxes Flash, just like Chrome, and has an excellent download manager and ad blocker built in as standard. The issue is that the interface is a smidge on the small side for fingers on an 11" 1080p device, making closing tabs and using the browser's back and forward buttons a smidge fiddly (multiple attempts are required for the tab crosses). I have set Windows' DPI to 125%, but it's not much better. However, this leads me into the on-screen keyboard.
Unlike a traditional mobile OS, the keyboard in desktop mode is treated like a seperate program, literally an onscreen keyboard, so keyboard shortcuts are still functional - now I can close/open tabs, and go back a page easily in the browser as the keyboard can be popped onscreen by tapping the keyboard icon in the taskbar. Unfortunately, again like other mobile OS, when you tap the address bar, you expect the keyboard to appear, which it doesn't. You must manually bring the keyboard up when you want to use it, and cross it off when you've finished. It is treated like a normal window, so can be moved around the screen (which means you can scroll it nearly off the screen).
An issue that is rather annoying is how scroll lists are treated in desktop mode - trying to scroll a drop down box in Maxthon is annoying as hell. One has to tap the up/down arrows (and they're very small, so it's all too easy to accidentally tap off the box), you can't use the scroll bar. This makes form filling with long forms rather tedious. Luckily, Internet Explorer's desktop version handles this fine, so it seems to be a browser engine issue, which will be fixed when Webkit is updated. Maxthon in Trident (IE) mode handles it just like IE.
So, all in all, a little fragmentation that could be a little more streamlined, and awaiting third parties to tweak existing applications to better suit touch.
Right, now for performance.
I've done CPU, SSD and GPU benchmarks, SuperPI, AS SSD and Cinebench.
Here are the results:
SuperPI (32M, 24 iterations):
AS SSD Benchmark:
Great results from the Toshiba SSD. I was a little worried it'd be a SATA 2 drive or something, but while it's no Vector or 840 Pro, it's very good for what would usually be a dog slow 5400rpm HDD...
Cinebench R11:
I also did a quick video of Portal on mid/high (no AA) 720p settings, just for "feel" as well as a boot sequence.
Obviously it's no gaming tablet, but for casual games, Source engine games and older titles, it's fine at 720p. Only thing of course, you'll almost certainly need a keyboard/mouse, so it loses a bit of portability.
