The Acer Iconia W3 leaked a few weeks back and while the renders looked official it was still considered to be a rumour. Now Acer in Finland has posted an official page for the W3 with specs and press shots which confirms the device is real and offers more information.
Previous information pointed to a Clover Trail powered device with 2GB RAM, 8″ screen and front and rear cameras running Windows 8 Pro. The device also briefly appeared on Amazon’s website with a price of $380 and some dubious specs (A4 processor) but now the full specs posted on Acer’s Finnish site confirm the device to come with an Intel Atom Z2760 CPU, Windows 8 Pro, 8″ WXGA screen, 2GB RAM, 64GB eMMC storage, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, BT 4.0, micro USB 2.0 and micro HDMI ports, microSD card slot with 8 hours of battery life. Front and rear cameras are visible from the press shots but their specs are not clearly given but the leaked information points to 2MB front and rear shooters.
The keyboard dock is optional and while being wider than the tablet itself will probably be more comfortable to type on than one that matched the tablet width. This will be especially useful with the included Microsoft Office Acer lists as being bundled with the device, though its not mentioned if this is a trial or the full version.
It will be interesting to see the timing for the release of the W3. Their website touts the device as the first 8″ with Windows 8 and if they do choose not to wait for the official release of Windows Blue, they obviously don’t seem to be waiting for Bay Trail, they could launch as the only 8″ Windows 8 tablet. And with Build coming up could we see these devices given out to developers to coincide with the release of the preview of Windows Blue? With Computex in a few weeks its going to be an interesting June in the Windows world.
Atom? *facepalm*
A dual core temash at same clock speed is faster and far better GPU. What are these guys from acer smoking?
First weak battery on Acer Aspire V5-122p and now this?!
More like what are you thinking?
The Temash isn’t a option for such a small tablet… even 10″ tablets are lucky to have as much capacity as the Temash gets in the Acer Aspire V5… Smaller tablets get even less!
Also, the dual core Temash isn’t as powerful as the quad core that Chippy reviewed with the Acer Aspire V5… For one thing it maxes out at 1GHz and has no Turbo mode like the quad core does.
While the dual core will probably get noticeably longer battery life than the quad core, it’ll still be noticeably less than what either ARM of ATOM SoCs can provide.
Temash doesn’t even support always connected standby mode… So it’s clearly better suited to larger tablets and laptops where productivity is more important and mobility is less important.
Will Baytrail be 64-bit & allow for more than 2GB RAM?
seems like they should have waited for 8.1 as well.
Yes, Bay Trail supports up to 8GB…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBtE6E-c730
Look at about 30 seconds in, they show how much RAM is installed in the demo system…
But it will depend on the RAM… There’s support for DDR3L-1333 but being a SoC it also supports LP-DDR3-1067 for up to 4GB, which will probably be the max you will see in tablet form…
Depending on RAM, you’d also a see a range of bandwidth between 8.5GB/s to 17GB/s…
Bay Trail will also support USB 3.0, PCI Express 2.0 compatibility, Gigabit Ethernet, and a couple of other things as well.
Mind that Bay Trail will cover an entire range of devices and not just tablets.
The T (tablet) series will be just under 3W TDP, the M Series bumps that up to 4-6.5W (at most) TDP, and finally the high end D series, meant for desktops and servers, will go up to 12W TDP… Mind that last one also ups the max cores to Octo (8)…
As for Windows 8.1, since MS announced it will be a free upgrade… It doesn’t matter much as it won’t be long before users will get it anyway…
good points James.
owning a current generation clovertrail is painful. metro apps are very smooth, fluid and usually responsive. metro apps are few and when you leave metro due to some issue in performance, compatibility, etc. desktop is a much slower, lower quality experience. cant say its the processor, emmc controller, ram, 2GB lp ddr2 memory, but desktop is quite useless. having said that a sata hd controller, 4GB ddr3, quality gpu may change that. lets not mention conn. standby. 1/5 times out of conn. standby you have to reboot or sometimes even the machine crashes. since clovertrail soc [i.e. BOM] is very similar i doubt my experience is unqiue.,so in the case of clovertrail, less power is exactly that [at least in desktop]. anxious to see if the amd solution will be hotter, higher power consuming but will maximize its power envelope.
Definitely clovertrail is race to bottom. didnt think we could get any deeper.
even the ipad doesnt (screen) tear, loose resolution during regular use.
@KJ – Got to be careful about comparisons to the iPad because it doesn’t have to run a desktop OS.
The iOS is optimized for mobile usage and very little else and unlike even Android, it prioritizes graphics and is why it seems to work so smoothly when even Android can seem laggy at times.
It also helps the iPad has more powerful graphical performance thanks to using a quad PowerVR GPU… the latest version being a SGX554MP4.
While Clover Trail uses a single PowerVR SGX545… So the Clover Trail has to depend on just having better CPU performance than most Cortex A9 SoCs, with newer Cortex A15’s rivaling and starting to exceed it.
The Temash Chippy reviewed in the Acer Aspire V5 is an example of AMD’s offerings. So we already have something to compare…
Showing it’ll provide more performance, but won’t be as power efficient…
The 4-5 hours Chippy noted is comparable to a Clover Trail getting 10-11 hours with the same capacity battery.
While part of your experience, with features like always connected standby is because of immature drivers… Both Windows 8 and the ATOM SoC drivers needed more time to develop.
But Bay Trail should alleviate those issues thanks to the better driver support they should have for the GMA and the fact Windows 8.1 would already be out then and apply all the fixes, etc… Along with better performance to back it all up…
A recent review stated that Clover Trail is 30% faster in CPU, gets significantly better battery life despite a smaller battery capacity, compared to a Temash Tablet. And Temash also required cooling fans.
So if that’s a better option for you, no one is stopping you from getting one. But I think most of the world would think otherwise.
Interesting camera placement. I guess Acer sees increased portrait usage with sub 10″ pc tablets. I’d really like to see Acer step up their game and offer a active digitizer. Or at least have one pc tablet/convertible sku that has a active digitizer option.
Looks like my Dell Latitude 10 will see an unfortunate “accident” and I’ll have to “settle” for this.
An integrated mouse in the bezel or some cramped but still useful touch keyboard with mouse cover (ie. Surface) would be nice.