Review Acer Iconia W510 Convertible

[Redaktion]

Keyboard tablet. Tablets alongside a keyboard dock are currently the latest craze among PC manufacturers: the lightweight of a tablet without having to waive on the comfort of a hardware keyboard plus more interfaces sounds good to the customer. Acer runs in the same vein with its Iconia W5 series and we scrutinized the Iconia W510.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Acer-Iconia-W510-Convertible.87097.0.html

[I4U]

Acer provided a new drivers package. Some users said it resolves a lot of problem and bring the device to a new level of comfort and usability. May you test it?

[argi]

This very charming, until finally stolen :(
http://acerw511.blogspot.com/2013/09/awas-acer-w511-anda-sah.html

[MDTORRES76]

I have 2 clients who purchased Acer W510 Iconia last year, May and June 2013 to be exact. This is NOT a very good product, Acer products in total are crap.

For client#1, purchased in for CAD$660, we need to send the tablet back for repair last Dec. 2013 because Windows 8 unable to boot. Through my client's shipping expense, It was repaired after 10 days. Unfortunately, just last March 7th, the same tablet won't power-on. We demanded Acer to REPLACE THE TABLET because for less than a year, it became defective twice. Tablet replacement was not approved by Acer.

For client#2, purchased in June 2013. December, the tablet won't power ON. Unfortunately, she lost the box, SNID, and receipt, and the Acer Customer Desk cannot help her.

I WILL NEVER EVER BUY AND RECOMMEND ANY OF ACER PRODUCTS AGAIN, you will loose a lot of customers for this.

[@GP_Beat]

I know this test review is quite old (2013), but the tablet has been discontinued around 2014 I believe. Anyhow, I was lucky to find a clearance unit at Staples in Canada and after reviewing a lot of Win8 tablets, I decided to go for this model, which initially didn't came with the dock (I found one in another store). Globally I paid about 450$CAD for the combo, which I considered a bargain, knowing that originally it was more around 600$-700$ to get it.
Not long after I bought it, I had to return the whole set, as the keyboard had a defective key that was repeating itself randomly (very annoying). That was minus point for QA at Acer.. I was also very annoyed that they required to send in the full combo, as Acer didn't want to service the docking alone !!??. After a few months running 8.0 I got the upgrade to Win 8.1 from Acer/Microsoft. The OS was pretty sleek and fast, had no major issues with it and run happily until Win10 was released. As an IT geek for the past 30 years, I wanted to get my hands on this, but couldn't because Acer had no release the W510 on the compatibility list for Win10 upgrades.. It was only early July 2016 that I was surprised one day to get the no-longer expected Windows 10 Upgrade wizard pop-up that stated my system was compatible. So I could finally make the jump and upgrade to Win10. Unfortunately this didn't went too well, as the OS had already gone thur one major upgrade and been used for the past 3 years, so lots of stuff was accumulated on the tiny C: drive. The original drive states 64GB, but you don't get that in full, since at least 10GB is reserved for the recovery partition and about 15GB are used by Win8.1.. so I had barely 10GB left for the upgrade.. It worked, but it took a long time. At the end I lost the docking USB port already during the 8.1 upgrade, which I could never figure out why (driver issues ?), but also the Bluetooth stack got inoperative at some point under 8.1.  After the W10 upgrade, most devices were working fine, since it was an upgrade. but system performance was slow compared to an Asus T100TA that was refreshed with W10 too, but had a maiden install and about the same specs.
I decided to give a full refresh and wipe out everything after taking backup of the data. During the process I also got rid of the recovery partition, since I made my mind up that I'll never go back to W8 anyway. This way I had the full capacity of the partition to use. One drawback : when doing a full fresh install from a USB key, you have no drivers installed, so the docking is not recognized, nor is the touch screen.. so you have to plus an external KB & mouse, plus thumb-drive to the single micro-USB port on the tablet itself.. not easy without a port-replicator.
After the W10 fresh install, I re-installed the latest Acer driver pack for the W510 (rel. 3.02 if not mistaken) and everything was working fine again and much faster.
The only minor issue I still have is due to the outdated Intel GMA 3600 driver that has not been updated since 2013 and officially not supporting Win10, but the Win8 driver still works. It has some strange behavior, especially in the Edge browser where you have a ghost navigation bar and tabs not being properly rendered.. This seems to be fully related to the display drivers, as on the Asus tablet, the same windows version (Anniversary 14393) works perfectly, but it's not the same graphic HW (Intel HD, not GMA).