Hoo-boy.
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Now here’s what Ars Technica’s own in-house Microsoft guy, Peter Bright, called the tablet “eight inches of horror,” and then went on to say this about it:
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.
He finishes by adding that Windows 8 is “Not cut out for 8-inch tablets.”
But something tells me Microsoft won’t be changing the tagline to, “the hardware might suck but at least the operating system is questionable.”
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