Many of the Intel-powered Windows 8 tablets that have been announced so far are priced well above the iPad—like Acer’s own Iconia W700, which is going to start at a whopping $799.99. Well, Acer took the wraps off another Windows 8 slate earlier this morning, and that device has a much more tantalizing $499.99 asking price.
The 10-inch Iconia W510 is no ARM-powered, WinRT-toting contraption. It packs an Atom Z2760 processor and runs the full version of Windows 8. Despite its Intel guts, this tablet weighs in at only 1.27 lbs and measures a slender 0.35″ thick—lighter and thinner than the new iPad. Battery life is rated at nine hours out of the box, too, and users can slap on a Transformer-style keyboard dock with an auxiliary battery that purportedly boosts the total run time to 18 hours.
Unfortunately, the Iconia W510’s display may not be up to par with the iPad’s gorgeous high-PPI panel—its resolution is just 1366×768. Acer doesn’t seem to have skimped on other features, though. Those include a two-megapixel front camera and an eight-megapixel rear camera, 32GB or 64GB of solid-state storage, a Micro HDMI output, a built-in microSD card reader, and Dolby Home Theater v4-certified audio through both the built-in speakers and the headphone output. Oh, and Acer says users can bend the keyboard dock back 295 degrees to use it “as a stand for presentation mode.”
The Iconia W510 is due out in the U.S. and Canada on November 9. It will cost the same in both countries: $499.99 for the base 32GB model, $749.99 for the 64GB variant with the keyboard dock, and $799.99 for the flagship W510P model, which will feature Windows 8 Pro, TPM security, and an extended warranty. The press release doesn’t quote a price for the keyboard dock, but I’m hoping it will be available as a separate add-on for the base config.