The Clover Trail (Atom Z2760) Review: Acer's W510 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 20, 2012 10:34 AM ESTWiFi
Connected over the Atom Z2760’s SDIO interface is Broadcom’s 4330 WiFi solution. The 4330 is a single-stream, dual-band (2.4/5GHz) 802.11n device. Wireless performance is reasonable - I was able to pull a maximum of 34Mbps down on a 5GHz network - but not great compared to the likes of the iPad 4 and Nexus 10.
Reception was comparable to most tablets of this size but I have been seeing a weird issue where Windows 8 claims there’s limited connectivity on a known network even if there aren’t any problems. Disconnecting and reconnecting always fixes it. I don’t know if this problem appeared more frequently after one of the latest Windows 8 updates, because I don’t remember having it much when I was testing Surface RT. Occasionally I’ve seen an issue where 5GHz networks won’t appear to the W510 without toggling airport mode. I’ve been chalking these issues up to early Windows 8 problems, but again I don’t remember having them with Surface so it’s unclear how much of this is specific to the W510.
Camera
The W510 features a rear facing 8MP camera (3264 x 2448, 1.4 - 2.5MB compressed JPEG size) and a front facing 2.1MP camera (1920 x 1080, ~600KB compressed JPEG size). Neither is particularly amazing at shooting photos, but like with most tablets the rear facing camera can produce passable results for web use:
Rear facing camera
Rear facing camera
Front facing camera
The camera UI and preview frame rate are both solid for stills, but there is a strange behavior where you’ll get a split second of live view after you’ve taken a shot using the rear camera before you’re shown a preview of the shot you just took.
Video is recorded in Main Profile (4.0) AVC at around 15Mbps with 2-channel stereo audio:
Maintaining 30 fps while shooting 1080p video isn't possible it seems. Video quality is average at best for a tablet using the rear facing camera:
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strangis - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
"Which means nothing, as these mobile chips are too underpowered to actually run the desktop x86 applications"My ATIV 500 painting an 11x17 300dpi multilayer image in Sketchbook Pro with the active digitizer smoothly disagrees with your assumption.
Just saying.
Wolfpup - Thursday, January 3, 2013 - link
Of COURSE they run desktop programs. They run Firefox, OpenOffice (and older versions of MS Office you might already own), media tools, IM clients, all SORTS of things that aren't available or even possible on other platforms.No, it won't reasonably run Skyrim, but there's a ton that it will run.
Personally I think this is pretty awesome...you get a good for the form factor CPU that oh yeah, happens to actually be compatible with what you have, and the price is the same as ARM stuff.
What's bad is the GPU...seems like they have almost a 2009 smartphone GPU in there rather than something more appropriate for 2013...and then there's the issue that metro is locked down, not a real PC...but then that's why you want an x86 tablet to begin with...at least you get the real desktop and in that mode it's a real PC.
jeffkro - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Basically for tablets and phones I prefer the android "library" so intel/windows really isn't for me anyways.SM123456 - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - link
Yes, but Microsoft has to use a x86 CPU if they are to be able run Windows apps.Basically this device and all other Windows 8 tablets under $600 are grossly overpriced netbooks with touch added and a keyboard taken away.
The $199 Acer C7 Chromebook with its 1.1 GHz dual core Celeron processor is at least twice as fast as this thing.
Dribble - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
So we have windows RT that is optimised both around the ARM cpu's and tablets. There is no old software - everything that you can get for it should both run fine on tegra 3 and work well with a small touch screen. This means stuff should just work well - this is what apple do so well, and MS are trying to emulate.On the other hand there is full windows. Now the reason to get this not RT is backwards compatibility. Most *old* windows apps require higher performance cpu's (e.g core i3) a big screen, a mouse and a keyboard. They don't use touch at all.
Taking that into account an atom tablet has a screen that's too small, a cpu that's too slow and a bad mouse/keyboard experience - sure you could plug both in but then it's not really a tablet any longer is it? Also all that backward compatibility support uses effectively a different ui - it's not a clean and polished single interface. Stuff won't just work well - the experience won't be as good.
Hence if you want full windows you'd be much better off with a laptop/ultra book - they are still touch screen so you get any touch benefits but they have much faster cpu's, better keyboard, etc.
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Not sure where you got that idea from. 99% of windows applications dont hardly use any cpu at all. Check task manager sometime. You will notice that most processes only consume a few seconds of cpu time per hour of system idle time. It is extremely rare for a windows application to peg even one cpu core to 100%.freedom4556 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
You that that's a percentage and it depends on what CPU you're looking at right? That's like saying, "Yeah, I never need more than 1% of my horsepower even doing 150mph uphill in a headwind." when you drive a Lamborghini. Try it again in a Honda and you'll not even be able to do it, nevermind 100% usage.Do you have an i7 or an Atom?
B3an - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
One thing that stood out to me in this article, is the bugs/reboots you encountered. You pretty much blamed them on Win 8, or made it sound that way. Which i thought was unprofessional, especially for you Anand. As theres a very good chance they're to do with a particular app, drivers on this device, or even it's hardware. Win 8 is a very solid stable OS, even more so than Win 7 on release.ltcommanderdata - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
True. But hasn't it always been the case that app and driver instability gets fairly or unfairly associated with Windows? At the same time, when things are working well, Microsoft is happy if you think of yourself as enjoying a "Windows" PC or tablet regardless of what particular software or hardware you are using in/on Windows. I guess we'll have to see how common problems are with other CloverTrail tablets. If they show up in CloverTrail tablets from other manufacturers, then even if the underlying OS is stable it still becomes Microsoft's problem if people are having trouble developing reliable apps/drivers/tablet using it.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
The issue is these were first party apps developed by MS, and I've seen some evidence of the same on other non-W510 platforms (I just don't remember this being the case with Surface RT but I've been using these x86 platforms longer than I did Surface).I'm curious to read Vivek's take on the ATIV Smart PC to see if it mirrors my experience.
Take care,
Anand