Battle the backlog with the new Acer Iconia Tab W500

MANILA, Philippines - No professional wouldn’t love the thought of a lighter workload, a shorter to-do list, and an easier nine-to-five.

No professional, in other words, wouldn’t love the new Acer Iconia Tab W500: a 10.1-inch Windows 7 tablet that delivers on its simple yet compelling promise of getting work done.

In a market cluttered with tablets that engage users in flights of fancy - but not much else - Acer has introduced the ultimate productivity device, one that, refreshingly, knows professionals’ longings and priorities.

This, in large part, is what makes the Acer Iconia Tab W500 so revolutionary: with a unique hybrid design that combines the portability of a touch-screen tablet and the reliability of a personal computer, plus a full-sized dockable keyboard to go along with a 10.1-inch high-definition LED-backlit screen, it’s poised to become a tablet quite unlike anything business users have ever seen, touched or worked with.

The 15.9-mm-thin Acer Iconia Tab W500 is actually smaller than a magazine — fitting more than comfortably into any briefcase or backpack — yet it also packs all the computing power that one needs to be able to truly work.

The tablet runs on a touch-optimized version of Windows 7 Home Premium, which is preloaded with the Microsoft Office Starter 2010 suite, and provides an operating environment that’s as familiar as any.

The system also includes an AMD C-Series dual-core processor, an A50M Fusion Controller Hub chipset, 2 GB of cutting-edge DDR3 memory, 32 GB solid-state drive, and a touch control interface called Acer Ring, which launches a selection of apps, tools, and utilities with one quick screen grab.

These advanced technologies come to life on every inch of the tablet’s beautiful high-resolution display, which Acer engineered with remarkable 1280 x 800 WXGA resolution (capable of full 1080p HD playback), LED backlighting, ambient light sensors, and Acer CrystalBrite anti-reflective LCD screen technology.

The result: crisper images, more brilliant colors, sharper contrasts, wider viewing angles, and overall, a visually stunning tablet experience.

Because the display also supports multi-touch controls and motion gestures, every interaction with the Acer Iconia Tab W500 feels natural and lifelike. With just a few taps, swipes, pinches, and flicks of the finger, users can battle the backlog and breeze through apps, e-mails, tasks, feeds, albums, to-do lists, files and folders, and more.

Switching to a notebook PC experience and gaining an instant productivity boost, meanwhile, is a matter of connecting the full-sized keyboard dock, which, with its quick-linking magnets, deftly transforms the innovatively designed tablet to a compact clamshell laptop.

With chiclet keys that provide a crisp, responsive feel — plus the integrated Acer FineTrack pointing device for simplifying navigation — the dock enables users to type up reports, spreadsheets, notes, presentations, and other urgent documents at an inspired pace.

Beyond typing, it also serves as a multi-functional home base for the Acer Iconia Tab W500, with its built-in two USB ports for external devices and fast Ethernet port for instant connection to the Internet.

Like the dock, the tablet itself is equipped with ports designed to seamlessly connect users to their data and other devices.

An HDMI port with HDCP support streams all kinds of content on the Acer Iconia Tab W500 — documents, slideshows, photo galleries, video — to a bigger audience and a wider screen, such as a PC monitor or HDTV.

The cross-platform Acer clear.fi sharing system, meanwhile, searches other devices within a home or office network — personal computers, smartphones, laptops, media players, and speaker systems — so that multimedia content can be stored, shared and synced wirelessly across the entire network.

Professionals with an eye for photography will notice two high-definition cameras on the Acer Iconia Tab W500: one in front and one at the back.

Collectively dubbed the Acer Crystal Eye, these dual cameras support audio-video recording, high-resolution image capture, and face-to-face Internet calls, via the Acer Video Conference Manager.

The set of software that comes with the Acer Iconia Tab W500 is as impressive as the hardware. No more playing catch-up with the rest of the world: equipped with the Acer InviLink Nplify 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity — plus preinstalled Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and built-in apps for Microsoft Silverlight and Skype — the tablet keeps users at the cutting-edge of the Web.

The highly intuitive TouchBrowser delivers a rich Internet browsing experience, while the integrated SocialJogger app displays aggregated content from Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube in one dazzling interactive frame.

There’s also the cloud-based My Journal Web clipboard, which organizes users’ favorite online content, so they can keep track of new updates using one neat and customizable app.

A number of key features have also been added by Acer to make the Acer Iconia Tab W500 a true mobile multimedia powerhouse.

An integrated AMD Radeon HD 6250 graphics card — with 256 MB of dedicated system memory and support for Microsoft DirectX 11 — smoothens and speeds up everything moving on the tablet’s gorgeous screen: 3D games, HD movies, Internet videos, screen-leaping UI animations, and more.

Dolby Advanced Audio v2 technology, meanwhile, enhances the clarity, tone and texture of sounds coming from the tablet’s built-in speakers to deliver a vibrant, cinematic surround sound experience that can be enjoyed anywhere.

To make sure the fun lasts even hours after unplugging, there’s also an embedded Acer PowerSmart long-life mAh Li-polymer battery pack.

With all these innovations packed into Acer’s new Windows 7 hybrid tablet, professionals will now have in their hands the perfect business tool to get more work done. Portability meets productivity in the Acer Iconia Tab W500, and that can’t be anything other than good news to those with long lists and heavy loads.