Acer Iconia W500 AMD C-50 10.1" Fusion Tablet Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,393 words · ~6 min read
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so today I have an unboxing of something that's very cool and very exciting this
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is the Acer Iconia Tab
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w500 this is a tablet PC it is using
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Windows 7 okay so let's just go over what it says on the box and then we'll
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get more into the fit and finish of the overall product once we get inside you
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can see it has a 10.1 in multi-touch LED
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backlit LCD supports HDMI it has Wi-Fi
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which it bloody well better it's going to pretend to be a tablet okay we've
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also got evidently a keyboard so let's
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go ahead and get this oh let's have a look at the specs so here we are we have
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Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit AMD dual core processor C50 bam that's the
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surprise because that is not only see you see how they have that listed as a
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processor not as a CPU well the reason is that this is an APU this is an AMD
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Fusion tablet so it uses the C50 Apu
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which means it has a CPU and a GPU built
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in to one die pretty sweet 10.1 in
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multi-touch HD LED LCD 2 gigs of memory 32 gig SSD 2inone card reader Wireless N
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1.3 megapixel webcam and a three Cell lithium ion battery now the thing about
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that three Cell lithium ion battery you might go oh three cell probably doesn't
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have great battery life well with AMD Fusion we're talking about a whole
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different ball of wax because Fusion uses very very little power due to the
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efficiency of the design okay so here's a little install guide for using the
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plug apparently you can rotate the plug should you so desire excellent here's an
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international Travelers warranty as well as a quick start guide next we have a
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setup and configuration guide which probably shows you a couple useful
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tricks and tips all right and let's go
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ahead and take this off find the tablet itself no let's see
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if we have any more accessories first oh yeah okay so there's our
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keyboard okay what do we got over here so there's our there's our power adapter so this is
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what they mean by being able to rotate it I suppose so you can put it this way
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or no I don't think it goes in that
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way oh yeah okay it looks like you got to lock it in there we go there all
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right so why don't we pull out the tablet portion
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first okay I was actually already playing around with this so I apologize
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in advance for the fact that it's got a couple fingerprints on it but you guys
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can deal all right so go ahead press the button
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here okay please wait we're going to get
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into Windows 7 Home Premium the default user is logged in there we go so I'll
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let cameraman have a look at that while I dig out the
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keyboard so that I can show that to you guys cuz that is a very cool little
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feature so let's get all this stuff out of our way so we can make room just for
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the product itself
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okay and here we go so let's do a quick
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tour of the device so here is a Windows
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button all right that's pretty much it for buttons on the front of the device
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so everything is multi-touch ready it is
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accelerated by a direct X11 GPU so that means that not only do you have support
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for your multi-touch but you're going to have full video acceleration for
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anything that is a direct compute open CL that's what you get with direct X11
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as well as Windows arog glass so let's
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move around to the side here we've got our HDMI output as well as an SD card
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reader okay we've got our volume up and
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down power we've got a headphone jack
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there's a low battery LED indicator down
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here we've got a ventilation Port we've
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also got our webcam right there uh moving this way we've got yet
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another webcam okay on the other side we have power
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in and then finally on the bottom we're going to find USB as well as a couple of
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pegs for mounting this to the included keyboard This appears to be some kind of
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lock which I guess is an orientation lock yep so it does have an
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accelerometer which means that you can hold it this
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way there we go or this
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way just like that and it'll resize your desktop and and now let's have a look at
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the keyboard itself so what you do is you evidently lift this
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up and plug it in so USB is going to
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power and give us an interface to this little included keyboard we've got one
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of those old school style uh rubber
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thing in the middle of the keyboard I actually really like this I used to I
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used to use this on on a really old laptop that I had if you've got two
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hands to use it this is is one of the best mousing interfaces I believe uh
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that has ever graced notebooks everywhere so uh I I'm personally a big
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fan of that the keyboard is a on this
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particular demo unit a sing uh unilingual or monolingual whatever you
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prefer to call it it is only one language so you've got fulls size shift
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Keys fullsize Enter key you've got a fullsize backspace key now the keyboard
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is quite small but remember this is only a 10.1 in screen so that's pretty much
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what we have to deal with now the most exciting thing about this tablet slash
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uh subnotebook bu a long shot is AMD Fusion
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so give me a second I'm going to get connected to our Wi-Fi and I'm going to show you guys the some of the advantages
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of AMD Fusion so here's our Fusion Tablet
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running my personal favorite uh YouTube
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HD video so we've got Big Buck Bunny running I'm actually going to find a
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more action-packed part to uh skip to for you you guys oh
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yeah this will do okay so you can see the playback is
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quite smooth now remember the direct X11
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uh component well I I can't really call it a GPU it's very challenging so the
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direct X11 graphics processor in the Apu
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which is part of the Apu is capable not only of accelerating flash it's also
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good for HTML 5 and it's going to give
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you the capability of using direct compute and open CL applications as well
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which is something that a non-direct X11 compliant part will not allow you to do
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now the C50 inside this particular
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tablet I'm just going to go ahead and close down iie
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here all right let's uh go to task manager so it is a dual core processor
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you can see the CPU usage is quite High even so we do have video running in the
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background and uh so it's splitting the load between the CPU and the GPU
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components of the APU going to go ahead and turn that off but
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it is a dual core so you can see that in the task manager and um it's a 9 watt part so I
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want to show you guys the total system power consumption let me turn my video
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back on in full screen mode here and I
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can go ahead and do that there we go and
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here we are so total system power consumption
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remember this is a rough ballpark figure is about 36 Watts for the entire to
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tablet so what that means is better battery life better performance and more
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overall capabilities for a fusion tablet like this don't forget to subscribe to
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