Just What You Never Wanted

So, there’s now an 8-inch Windows tablet. It looks like this.

Maybe it wouldn’t look so ugly if Acer stuck some Microsoft stickers on it or something. Here’s what Ars Technica’s Windows guy, Peter Bright, had to say:

The Acer Iconia W3’s screen is a standout—because it is worst-in-class. I hated every moment I used the Iconia W3, and I hated it because I hated the screen. Its color accuracy and viewing angles are both miserable (whites aren’t white—they’re weirdly colorful and speckled). The screen has a peculiar grainy appearance that makes it look permanently greasy. You can polish as much as you like; it will never go away. The whole effect is reminiscent in some ways of old resistive screens.

It’s hard to overstate just how poor this screen is. At any reasonable tablet viewing distance, the color of the screen is uneven. The viewing angle is so narrow that at typical hand-held distances, the colors change across the width of the screen. At full arm’s length the screen does finally look even, but the device is obviously unusable that way.

Want to know the best part? It runs Windows 8, which is only partly touch-functional, so you’ll be spending a lot of time trying to poke at undersized buttons on that terrible screen.

Who at Acer thought this could possibly be a winner?