We’ve had an Acer Iconia Tab W500 (Amazon, $500) in the house for a few months now, so I figured it was time to give it a review.

Our family had netbook at one point (a 3rd generation HP with Windows 7) but we returned it within weeks. While the modern netbook is a fine computer, a small keyboard isn’t productive for typing, and for media and reading experiences, a trackpad is a buzz kill. It’s a fiendish device of torture on every Mac or Windows laptop I’ve ever had, and when placed directly in your crotch, as  with a netbook, it’s in its most inconvenient and obnoxious form.

Now the Iconia Tab W500 is still no typing-productivity device. The included keyboard attachment is hazardous to you & your slate’s health, and you should never use it. It’s the worst keyboard I’ve ever used, never mind it doesn’t hold the tablet part securely enough to be used anywhere but on a table, and not really even there.

But the W500 is unexpectedly awesome for email, media, and web browsing/web apps, in no small part to the touchscreen’s inevitable defeat of the trackpad on netbooks. I was surprised that touch works nearly as well as on the excellent iPad. I find something’s not touchable or tricky to interact with about as often as I do on iPad, and that’s saying something. The screen is smooth glass and very accurate, even moreso than the high-end business convertable tablet I use at work, and Windows 7 is set at 125% zoom so with the exception of some apps (Zune…) everything’s big enough to touch.

Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome are smooth on most sites, though they both get bogged down on ad-heavy sites. HD video from YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu plays full-screen quite nicely.

With a couple adjustments (see below) the on-screen keyboard does the right thing and you can peck out tweets, googs, and runs of text. If I could ask my employer for one Christmas present in Windows 8, it’d be input prediction/spelling and that sweet chick-chack-chick sound from Windows Phone 7. (The Windows 7 on-screen keyboard is dead silent, and that’s just creepy.)

I continue to be surprised by the device’s performance and quality. I bought this sight unseen thinking it’d return it and slink into line at the Apple store, but no, the Iconia Tab W500′s a keeper!

A couple things you may want to know about the W500:

• It has an exhaust fan. It’s near silent, but not silent. The back gets warm, not hot, and the air trickling from the fan is usually room-temperature.
• We’ve found it sustains good performance for 2 users switching profiles without logging out. (It has 2GB RAM, and I think it could probably sustain 4 users.) See my to-do list below regarding multiple users.
• The screen rotates when you turn it. It takes 3 seconds to rotate. There’s also a physical lock switch.
• It’s rated at 6 hours battery life. It can happen, but expect 4 unless you’re only web-browsing or reading.
• What you’ll find at the sides, in wide/landscape orientation:
  • Bottom: 2 USB ports and the lock switch. Speakers face the rear, and there’s a Windows button (a hardware Start button) facing the front, which glows unnecessarily
  • Left: HDMI port, SD card slot (yes you can add storage), fan, volume rocker, an strangely small sleep button, and headphone jack
  • Top: The second fan port and front and rear cameras
  • Right: Power jack

A to-do list:

• Update to Internet Explorer 9 and Flash 10.3 (Google Chrome is fine, but you’re on your own figuring out how to make touch pan/zoom work. IE9 has nice touch pan/zoom out of the box.)
• Move the keyboard to the bottom of the screen, make it wider, and change the keyboard “drawer” to display on hover instead of click (because that way you don’t have to touch the drawer twice when you want to pull the keyboard out immediately.)
• If more than one person will use the tablet
• Create a Windows account for each person
• Change the power option to require login on wake (this makes it easier to switch users.)
• Don’t uninstall “Acer Device Control.” This is responsible for screen rotation. All the rest of the “Acer”-titled apps, on our device, anyhow, was OK to uninstall.
• Try uninstalling Windows feature “Windows Search”. I find we’re not creating new files, and use the same apps over and over, so we aren’t searching. Uninstalling Windows Search gives back some Start space and some speed.

The HP TouchSmart 600 is the new addition to our lounge, kicking out the old Apple/NewEgg hybrid. It just works, is space-efficient, and the touch screen is fun & useful. We’ve had it for a month now and are enjoying it. The specific model I’ll discuss here is the 600xt, but few of the features are specific to the “xt.”

Touchscreen? But you’ll get gorilla arm!

A touchscreen’s no substitute for a keyboard and mouse when trying to nail down a blog post, but Windows 7’s “natural user interface” paired with touch hardware is surprisingly useful. I’ve built up muscle memory with a keyboard & mouse I just can’t shake when working, but when sitting down to surf, watch videos, or help a child over-the-shoulder, touch makes sense & works. Mekhi, 3, uses the touch screen as if all computers had them.

This generation all-in-one PC uses a type of screen which recognizes at most 2 contact points. You don’t actually have to touch the glass (getting within 1/8th inch is close enough.) No pressure’s required and it works with fingernails, but be wary of your palm & knuckles. 1 or 2 fingers touching + 1 knuckle floating nearby feels like 1 or 2 points of contact, but it’s 3, and interaction gets erratic… the scroll, zoom, or click you didn’t intend comes from that knuckle. You’ll learn what hand positions work & what positions cause problems as you go.

Does the screen get greasy? Yes. But it’s bright, and unless it’s off you won’t notice the streaks. This neat-freak is happy to report the manual says generic glass cleaner is recommended for use on the screen. (I always thought Windex was a bad idea due to screen coatings, but HP must’ve colluded with someone to make it work.)

Apps: The ritual cleaning of a new PC

This PC comes with Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7. These are downgraded versions of some of the Surface table apps:

• Surface Globe’s got wow factor, but it doesn’t provide the functionality you might expect in map apps: for example, it can look up addresses, but it do directions. It’s just a globe you can fly around. Bing Maps (the web version of the same maps) is quite a bit more useful & supports touch, and I suspect Google Earth’s got some funtimes multi-touch support now.
• Blackboard is a fun physics game; my nieces and nephews have a great time with it.
• Garden Pond is a bit frustrating, as is Rebound, the most ill-advised table hockey game, ever.
• Lagoon is a koi pond screensaver.
• Surface Collage is a creative wallpaper-maker for kids and kitschy adults, though HP didn’t install it by default. (Read on.)

Free software we added:

• Windows Live Essentials (Photo Gallery, Writer, Movie Maker, Messenger)
• Windows Security Essentials (free top-rated virus scanner that doesn’t nag)
• Zune 4.0 (awkward when using touch due to WinAmp-style small controls, but otherwise this is our favorite media app)
• Skype (already installed, but was an old version)
• Surface Collage (add this by choosing “Change” on “Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7” under “Programs and Features” control panel)
• WorldWide Telescope, the amazing astronomy version of Surface Globe
• Office 2010 Beta

What HP provideth and we uninstalleth:

• Norton’s anti-virus (naggy and irrelevant)
• HP’s own “TouchSmart” apps (calendar, photo viewer, RSS reader, Hulu, etc.) I don’t much care for the big-sweeping-gestures touch interfaces in these apps, and these were all redundant with the apps I prefer
• HP Games: this package of games is bamboozleware. Mekhi started to like a Bob The Builder game that claimed in its many WildTangent speed bump screens “unlimited plays”, so I let him play it, start to like it, and then it started demanding payment.
• Works (Office 2010 Starter will make this irrelevant)

Hardware Notes

Color-adjustable lighting is a really nice detail. It can be set to any color of the rainbow using the HP Ambient Light app, and there’s a dimmer switch on the left side. I’m not sure whether this feature’s on models other than the 600xt.

I wasn’t a big fan of the piano (shiny) black finish, but it’s growing on me. Turn a desk lamp on & the color lighting and it looks pretty good.

The easel stand is very strong, and much better thought out than the Apple Cinema HD display this all-in-one replaces. It tilts back between 5 and 40 degrees, and a rubber foot ensures it doesn’t slip. Don’t get any crazy ideas about tilting it back 90 degrees. The manual specifically forbids putting it on its back, I suspect because of the weight of the glass.

The 23” screen is bright and evenly lit except for at the very bottom. Colors seem accurate. The screen is glossy 1920×1080; of course I wish it was matte and 1920×1200 but that’s hard to come by these days.

The speakers are loud for built-ins, but I wouldn’t use them to fill a room with sound. They’re fine for sound effects & listening to music when sitting in front of the PC.

The built-in webcam is standard hardware.

The wireless mouse is nicely matched and works well. The wireless keyboard is space efficient, but not the best. The keys are very flat and my fingers hit the lower edge when using the space and arrow keys. Both mouse and keyboard seem to be infrared-based, accounting for epic battery life.

Though it doesn’t affect appearance, there’s a cheesy plastic cover over the ports in the back. I predict it’s what will break first, especially if the kids find it. Day-to-day use USB ports are thankfully on the sides.

Performance & Power Usage

We customized the hardware online with an Intel P8700 processor because that chip’s more efficient and supports Windows XP Mode and Virtual PC.

The resulting Windows Experience Index is 5.9 (Memory 7.0, Graphics & Gaming Graphics 6.4, Processor 6.1, Primary Hard Disk: 5.9).

I suspect a Intel T6600 processor would make the score 5.7 or so (and it does not support virtualization.)

On the Windows 7 “Power Saver” plan, I measured 3 Watts at sleep, 45W with the screen off, 70W with the screen on, and 90W at the highest workload I could manage. It’s better for the environment and my power bill than the old PC, for certain. (I got these power metrics using a Kill-A-Watt.)

Other notes

The boot screen describes our model as “TouchSmart 600-1005xt”. I believe the retail (for example Best Buy) model that’s comparable is the TouchSmart 600-1055.

Window 7’s built-in Weather gadget defaults to showing weather for “New York, NY”:

An aside: The default of “Cupertino, CA” on Macs is a cute in-jokes for employees and fanatics, but aren’t there statistically better choices for US retail, like, say, the most populated US metro area? Windows 7 has fixed a ton of such duh-moment details. On Windows Vista, yep, it was “Redmond, WA.”

When we go to set our actual location, we see a disabled “Find location automatically” option:

Searching for “location” in the Start Menu, we find the “Location and Other Sensors’” control panel, and find what’s wrong… captain, sensors are offline!

So, can I install a sensor?

Yep.

Well, maybe you can. I can’t.

A Microsoft partner, JW Secure, built a software prototype location sensor using IP address to get estimated location.  But driver developers are the audience for this prototype… I’m no driver developer. I mean, I can sling an INF file, but there’d have to be an INF file provided to sling. I’d love to try this out as a consumer: if you can get LaptopLoJack working as a Windows 7 location sensor, please let me know. I got this far:

By fall there should be retail PCs that have all sorts of sensors, from real GPS, to laptops with 3G cards that provide cell-ID based location, to software sensors like this prototype in cheaper PCs. No INF slinging required.

Want Windows Live Messenger to show up in the notification area:

instead of the taskbar?

The behavior of Messenger on Windows 7 startled me too, but I came to like it. It’s much easier to work with from taskbar than it ever was from “systray” (the nerdy, I-guess-you-had-to-be-there, name for the notification area.)

That said, you can get the old behavior using compatibility mode:

1. Click the Windows button and type “Windows Live Messenger” into the search box.
2. When the “Windows Live Messenger” icon appears, right-click it and choose “Properties.”
3. Click the Compatibility tab, and choose Vista compatibility mode:
   
4. Exit Messenger, and start it again.

An alternative for the screen-size-challenged is to resize the taskbar:

1. Right-click anywhere on the taskbar and choose “Properties.”
2. Check “Use small icons”
    

Karsten Palmvig provided the compatibility mode tip, among others.

No, not yet. The current plan is for it to be included in the Windows 7 Release Candidate later this year:

Windows 7 Beta already includes a pre-release candidate version of Internet Explorer 8 that is optimized for that release. Windows 7 enables unique features and functionality in Internet Explorer 8 including Windows Touch and Jump Lists which require additional product tests to ensure we are providing the best Windows experience for our customers. We will continue to update the version of Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows 7 as the development cycles of Windows 7 progress and plan to include the final version of Internet Explorer 8 in the release candidate version of Windows 7 later this year. For the latest information on Windows 7, visit the Windows 7 site. [This quote from the Internet Explorer 8 site.]

Image by Peter Kaminski via Flickr

An update for Internet Explorer was released yesterday that corrects a few IE crashes & extension issues on Windows 7, but the word from the horse’s mouth is: No, this is not IE8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows 7.

This update does not contain other changes introduced between the Windows 7 Beta and Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 [via http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/]

The standards compliance & performance improvements in IE8 Release Candidate 1, which I’ve heard are substantial, are still not yet available for Windows 7 users in the general public. You’ll have to keep limping along with Windows 7 Beta’s variation on IE8 Beta 2 until Windows 7’s own release candidate arrives.

The nitty-gritty details [via http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962921]

• When Internet Explorer 8 is installed with Adobe Flash Player 10, Internet Explorer may become unresponsive.
• You experience a Print dialog box that is unusable when you try to print an Adobe PDF document.
• After a crash, Internet Explorer 8 becomes unresponsive, and you must restart the computer to resolve the problem.
• Internet Explorer 8 may crash when you visit some Web sites. (I thought you said this was going to be nitty-gritty!)
• Internet Explorer 8 may crash when you resize the browser window.
• Internet Explorer 8 does not seem to remember information that was stored in cookies on the computer.
• Popular third-party extensions cause crashes in Internet Explorer 8.
• Previously blocked third-party extensions are no longer blocked after you upgrade to Internet Explorer 8.