The capacitive touchscreen supports four-point multitouch and is both accurate and responsive. Though a built-in accelerometer automatically rotates the screen, the Iconia Tab W500 had an unusually long lag time for rotation redraw; ultimately, this drawback convinced me to lock the orientation and work in landscape mode all the time.

The nonremovable battery is rated at 3250mAh, and it managed a run time of 5 hours, 28 minutes in the PCWorld Labs' battery life tests, not quite as long as most Intel Atom-based tablets endured.

Another trade-off of the Acer's slightly more powerful processor is increased heat. Whereas Atom Oaktrail chips are designed to run fanlessly, the AMD C-50 uses active cooling, with an air intake on the right side of the tablet that exhausts through the top. The tablet was almost always emitting warm air, but it never actually got hot; and in my use, I never found that the fan noise got distractingly loud--unlike, for example, the . The exhaust port's position is such that if you want to hold the tablet in portrait mode--thereby putting the air exhaust on the right side--the exhaust is high enough that your hand won't cover it.

In landscape mode, the air exhaust is the element on the top of the tablet. On the right side, you'll find the AC power port. The left side houses a full-size HDMI port, an SD Card slot, the air intake, a volume rocker switch, the power button, an LED that indicates charging, and the headphone port. Along the bottom are the guide holes for the keyboard dock, two USB ports, and a rotation lock switch. Having two USB ports is useful if you want to use more than one device; but Acer's decision to place both USB ports on the bottom of the tablet can be limiting, depending on how you use the device.

Keyboard Dock