The first Windows 8 inch tablet with an 8 inch screen is now up for pre-order. The Acer Iconia W3 has a list price of $380 and up, but if you pre-order from Office Depot you can snag a model with 32GB of storage for $350.

Staples and Amazon are also taking orders, but they’re charging $380. Amazon has a 64GB model for $430 as well.

Acer Iconia W3

The Acer Iconia W3 features an 8.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display, an Intel Atom Z2760 Clover Trail dual-core processor, and 2GB of RAM. It runs Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, which means not only can you run full-screen “Modern” style apps from the Windows Store, but you can run pretty much any desktop Windows app you’d like.

Just don’t expect every app to look great on an 8 inch screen or run smoothly on a machine with a low-power Atom processor. The key here is that the Iconia W3 can do a lot of things a Google Nexus 7 or iPad mini can’t, not necessarily that it can do them very well. But unlike Android or iOS tablets, you can run popular Windows apps such as the full versions of Photoshop, Office, or iTunes.

In fact, the Acer Iconia W3 comes with Office 2013 Home & Student pre-loaded.

The tablet also features 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, a micro HDMI port, micro USB port, and microSD card slot, a 2MP rear camera and 2MP front-facing camera, and support for up to 8 hours of battery life.

Acer will also offer a full-sized Bluetooth keyboard for the tablet soon. It’s expected to sell for $90.

via Engadget

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17 replies on “Pre-order Acer Iconia W3 8 inch Windows tablet for $350 and up”

  1. i figure win8 adds about 200 dollars to the price,,,i will pass thank you..

    1. Nonsense, only the retail version costs that much… OEMs pay a fraction of that per system sold and office is being included free for systems smaller than 10″!

      Really, Android devices running on the same hardware would maybe cost you 30-50 dollars less at most.

  2. I really want to see haswell on this or baytrail or something. Also really hope that you can open it up and upgrade the internals

  3. “…support for up to 8 hours of battery life”

    I would like to put in a vote of no confidence regarding that statement.

    Support and upto translate into significantly less than 8 hours of real usage

    1. So far the Windows 8 tablets running on the ATOM SoCs have gotten about their advertised run times. Typically doing better than ARM versions like the MS Surface that uses the Tegra 3.

      This is a smaller tablet though, so will likely get less run time as it’s unlikely they could fit the same size battery, but it should still get you pretty near that advertised battery life…

  4. Hold on, if I’m understanding this correctly, the Acer Iconia W3 will ship with full WIndows 8, not Windows RT?? If that’s a case, then great!

    1. Yes, it’s running on a ATOM Clover Trail Z2760 SoC and those are x86… RT is only for ARM devices!

  5. I’m still holding out hope for a 7″-8″ Windows 8 tablet that has a mouse and buttons in the bezel. Much more useful than an active stylus for me.

    I have the Dell Latitude 10 and the active stylus. Not being an artist nor an inker, it’s annoying to take out the stylus to activate mouse hover elments in the OS and web sites or have better pointer accuracy. I’d much rather have a regular mouse pointer that has the controls in the bezel.

      1. I’ve seen those and also the never released Viliv X70 with the beze mouse but it wasn’t until the Clover Trail Atom that made Windows more responsive.

        I had a Viliv N5 before my wife spilled coffee on it and there’s a big difference between the perceived performance of it and my Latitude 10. I’ve tried Windows 8 on other Atom Z530 devices so it’s not just the OS that made the difference.

        1. Well, each doubling of CPU cores can provide about 50% performance improvement and combined with faster clock speeds can significantly boost performance.

          Specifically, the Z530 was single core 1.6GHz and the Z2760 is a dual core at 1.8GHz…

          The old Silverthorne ATOM also couldn’t switch states anywhere near as fast and smoothly as the present Clover Trail ATOM. So the Z-Series ATOMs tended to be much more sluggish than the N-Series because they were optimized for lower power consumption but couldn’t do so without greatly increasing latency.

          The present ATOMs solve those issues and so operates more like a N Series ATOM, which combined with the dual cores and faster clock speed explain its performance.

          Though, it’s still a netbook range performer but the Imagination PowerVR GPU based GMA is well adapted for mobile usage and still provides hardware acceleration to play HD videos up to just over 20Mbps bit rate Blu Ray… overall about 3x better than the Pine Trail GMA 3150…

          So it compares pretty well against even the higher end ARM SoCs, though the highest end can now exceed it but that’ll only be until the next gen Bay Trail comes out and radically improves performance for the ATOM…

    1. I totally agree about the bezel mouse over an active stylus.

      I may wait for Bay Trail though since I might install Linux. I won’t get the better Windows 8 power management but the battery life should still be a lot better than my Viliv S5.

      1. Ya, I’ve considered waiting for Bay Trail (I may have to if no bezel mouse mini tablets come out) for better Linux support. For now, I’m putting up with Cygwin for a local bash shell and SSH client to my Linux desktops. Running a Linux desktop distro in a virtual machine with a Z2760 was definitely too slow for me.

        1. Bay Trail also supports Intel Virtualization Technology… So it’ll provide both more performance and the possibility of getting better VM support as well…

          Windows 8 Pro can take advantage of it with Hyper-V, etc…

  6. Pricing is getting a bit more realistic. I am sure prices will continue to drop. My concern is battery life and storage capacity. If they don’t want to offer more than 64GB (how much is free?) perhaps they could offer a second microSD card slot?
    Not too worried about the Atom processor with a machine this size. I doubt anyone would try to use it for heavy weight computing.

    1. The battery is probably taking up the bulk of the space inside… while they’re probably using last gen parts to keep costs down…

      Next gen systems though will have access to higher density NANDs that will not only offer more capacity but higher level of performance as well.

      They’re also going to be moving to the eMMC v4.5 specification that increases the max theoretical bandwidth from 104MB/s to 200MB/s.

      Samsung’s Pro Class 1500 eMMC is already available with read speeds of up to 140MB/s and write speeds of up to 50MB/s and capacities up to 128GB… Btw, it also uses cache memory with 400MB/s bandwidth…

      So, even though it’ll still be within the SATA I performance range, it should be a lot more responsive than any eMMC before…

      Presently, the Lenovo Thinkpad and Samsung ATIV tablets using Clover Trail Z2760 SoC have a eMMC read speed of only about 82MB/s and 34MB/s write speed for comparison… while others get a bit less…

      While, they’re also switching to faster and more energy efficient RAM… Switching from LP-DDR2-800 RAM for the Clover Trail Z2760 to LP-DDR3-1066 RAM for the upcoming Bay Trail-T…

      Not to mention we’d have to wait for the Windows 8.1 update that should provide some automatic scaling for the desktop for better usage on small tablets and better support for smaller screens in general… along with Modern UI not necessarily needing the 720P minimum to work fully…

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