Acer Iconia Tab A510

Acer's new Android tablet, the Iconia Tab A510 ($449.99 list), doesn't give you quite enough for your money. The tablet market is insanely competitive: You have to deliver on style, price, or apps to succeed. While the A510 (Best Deal: $449.99 at Amazon) is a decent Android 4.0 tablet with the latest quad-core processor, it's beaten by its competitors in nearly every measure.

Physical Design
If you're used to the sleek metallic edges of the latest Asus or Toshiba tablets, the A500 will be a bit of a disappointment. At 6.9 by 10.2 by .4 inches (HWD) and 23.5 ounces, it's slightly thicker and heavier than its top competitors. For instance, the Asus Transformer TF300 ($399, 4 stars) is just a little slimmer at .38 inches and lighter at 22.2 ounces, and the Asus Transformer Prime ($499, 4 stars) is slimmer and lighter still.

But it's not the size that's the issue here. Acer uses a lot of plastic and not much metal in the black-and-silver case, leading to a slightly chintzy feel. The mildly textured plastic back is practical, but doesn't feel premium, even when compared to other plastic tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) ($249, 4 stars).

The A510's odd-looking MicroUSB jack comes with an adapter that turns it into a full-sized USB port. The tablet supports external USB keyboards and storage, as long as that storage is formatted as FAT32. That's pretty hot; it means you can play videos off an external hard drive on this tablet. Asus and Toshiba tablets have that feature too. There's also a built-in mic on top, a rotation lock, and dual speakers on the bottom.

Turn on the Iconia 510 and you get a workaday 1280-by-800-pixel LCD panel, which is absolutely standard on midrange 10-inch tablets. That's on par with the latest models from Asus, Samsung, and Toshiba, although many tablet watchers are holding out for the upcoming 1920-by-1200 models, which will compete more closely with the new Apple iPad's ($499, 4.5 stars) 2048-by-1536-pixel screen.

Acer touts its 9800mAh / 36.26W battery as a cure for battery-life blues, and we got strong performance with it: 9 hours, 34 minutes of continuous video playback with Wi-Fi on and brightness turned to max. That beat out the 7 hours, 53 minutes we got on the Asus TF300 (Best Deal: $399.99 at P.C. Richard & Son), not to mention the five and a half hours the new iPad achieved.

Android and Apps
The A510 runs Android 4.0.3 with a light skin, Acer's Ring UI. Take a look at our full review of Android 4.0 (4 stars), Ice Cream Sandwich, for more details on the basic OS here.

Pressing a virtual button at the bottom of the screen pops up five quick app shortcuts, a carousel of Web bookmarks, and a volume control. The tablet also comes with a few custom widgets and apps. Acer Print lets you print documents or Web pages to a wide variety of Wi-Fi-enabled printers. Aupeo is a custom radio app. McAfee does antivirus duty, Polaris Office reads Microsoft Office documents, and clear.fi is a DLNA media server.

Benchmarks came out looking great, as they generally do on tablets with Nvidia's blazing Tegra 3 processor. Running here at 1.3GHz, the A510 scored faster than the 1.2GHz Asus Transformer Pad TF300T and roughly on par with the original Transformer Prime (Best Deal: $499.99 at P.C. Richard & Son), which also had a 1.3GHz quad-core processor.

But I encountered strange performance slowdowns when testing the A510. Sometimes on-screen buttons weren't responsive; I found this both on the built-in keyboard and in Zen Pinball. Sometimes screens took an extra moment to render. These issues didn't occur all the time, but they happened often enough to annoy (and to lose some pinball games).

10-inch Android tablets still have a problem with finding good apps in Google Play. As most apps are designed for small phone screens, many prominent apps look pretty awful on large Android tablets. The A510 offers two options to help with this problem: You can download either Tablified Market ($1.49, 4 stars), with a list of 1,500 or so top-notch tablet apps, or Nvidia's Tegra Zone, with a few dozen high-quality games designed for Tegra-powered tablets. Those outlets improve the situation, but app availability still falls far short of the Apple iPad, which has over 200,000 third-party apps with UIs designed specifically for tablets. The A510 connects to the Internet using Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n (albeit only on 2.4GHz, not 5GHz). It had no trouble connecting to our WPA2-protected networks. It also supports Bluetooth 2.1. And there's a blocked-off SIM card slot behind a door on the side, a sloppy touch—either eliminate the slot or make it active.

Multimedia and Conclusions
The A510 has 32GB of built-in storage as well as a microSD card slot that supports 32GB cards, hidden behind a door on the side. It plays all the usual audio and video formats, including MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG, WAV, WMV, H.264, MP4, DivX and Xvid (in AVI containers). Video files up to 1080p resolution looked sharp and clear. Oddly, though, the built-in micro HDMI port only put out 720p resolution to our TV.

The tablet has a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 1-megapixel front camera. Indoor shots taken with the rear camera looked noisy, with a decidedly purple cast. Not great.  Low-light photos showed some blur from low shutter speeds. Outdoors, images were sharper, but still with that purplish color imbalance. The front camera's 1-megapixel still images actually had better colors.

The tablet records 1080p video at 30 frames per second outdoors, but indoors that drops to a jittery 16 frames per second. 720p videos indoors clock in at 20 frames per second. As I know the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor can handle 1080p at 30 frames per second without breaking a sweat, this is probably just a cut-rate camera module.

If the Iconia Tab A510 cost $50 less, it would have a different rating. Priced at $450, this tablet sits in an uncomfortable middle ground. It certainly has some things going for it, most notably its long battery life and powerful speakers.

Unfortunately for the A510, you can get more capable tablets for less. The Asus TF300T, at $399 for a similar 32GB model, gives you 95 percent of the A510's speed, along with a better camera and slimmer form factor, for less money. The Apple iPad 2, currently running $399, is another prime competitor—it isn't as fast as the Iconia 510, but it has far, far more tablet-optimized apps. I'd also keep an eye out for Toshiba's upcoming tablet line, which we did a recent hands-on with. It promises Tegra 3 power and Android 4.0 with USB host mode in a sleeker body.

Panasonic Toughbook CF-31

The Panasonic Toughbook CF-31 ($4,843 street) is not indestructible. Let us shoot it with a machine gun or run over it with a bulldozer, and we bet we could put a dent in it. But put Panasonic's fully rugged laptop in harm's way with the kinds of environments and applications that police forces and field workers encounter, and it'll laugh off treatment that would shatter a normal laptop like Bonomo Turkish Taffy—surviving 300 pounds of pressure on its closed lid, for instance, or repeatedly being dropped from six feet (while closed and switched off; from three feet while open and running), or ignoring nearly six inches of rain in an hour. The IP65 weatherproofing and MIL-STD-810G shock, vibration, and temperature torture tests are a laptop engineer's nightmare. The Toughbook CF-31 (Best Deal: $4,929.71 at Rugged Depot) takes them in stride, making it overkill (and overpriced) for business travelers but a sturdy solution for vertical markets that demand maximum durability in a desktop replacement.

The CF-31 that Panasonic sent PCMag for review is an older model, with a first-generation 2.53GHz Intel Core i5-540M processor and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 graphics adapter. While a few of Panasonic's resellers such as Mobile Ingenuity are still selling such CF-31 Mark I systems, comparable units now on sale (at around the same price) feature newer Core i5-2540M and Radeon HD 6750 silicon. Presumably later this year we can look forward to CF-31 Mark III units built around Intel's new "Ivy Bridge" processors. The Toughbook's general design and rugged construction, however, remain unchanged—as does the consistent docking-station and dashboard-mounting solution that's served Panasonic and its customers for over a decade.

Design
The CF-31 is a hefty small suitcase, measuring 2.9 by 11.9 by 11.5 inches and weighing 8.8 pounds, complete with a pull-out carrying handle on its front edge. The sides, bottom, and border of the lid are made of hard black plastic, with the lid and palm rest made of silver magnesium alloy. The handle has a hole and tether cable anchor to hold the plastic stylus for the touch screen.

Some touch screens are dim, but the Panasonic's 13.1-inch panel is exceptionally bright. Designed to be readable outdoors, it's almost too bright or washed-out indoors at its highest backlight settings, but offers vivid colors and sharp contrast at medium settings. It's an old-fashioned 1,024 by 768 non-widescreen with fairly narrow viewing angles, but the touch screen responds accurately to a tap of stylus or finger.

The chiclet-style keyboard has a clicky, medium-soft typing feel; Fn-F12 cycles through several backlight levels, though even the brightest is relatively dim. The Delete key is at the lower right, by the cursor arrows, instead of at the upper right where it belongs, but there are dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys. The touchpad is unfortunately tiny—roughly 2.25 by 1.5 inches—and requires too much force—a sharp rap—to register a tap, so we relied on its twin mouse buttons to click and the stylus or a finger to scroll or move the cursor large distances.

Features
The CF-31's ports and pieces are hidden behind hinged doors or panels that snap shut with a secure click. On the Toughbook's left side are the double-latched battery pack and a cupboard door revealing the modular DVD±RW drive; PC Card, ExpressCard, and Smart Card slots; and an SD memory card reader. On the right are the removable 250GB hard drive (320GB in current models) and HDMI, Ethernet, and two USB 2.0 ports plus the AC power connector. Two more USB 2.0 ports, a docking station connector, a VGA port, and headphone and microphone jacks are at the rear, along with a serial port.

Our test unit was also outfitted with a fingerprint reader for security and Gobi 2000 3G mobile broadband, as well as 802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Windows XP was preinstalled, with Windows 7 Professional—32-bit, not 64-bit—provided on DVD. We installed the latter for our tests; normally we'd gripe about a 32- rather than 64-bit OS for gamers and media editors, but we don't think people are likely to use such apps on a Toughbook. Indeed, we suspect most customers will either use specialized vertical-market software for the likes of patrol cars and utility crews or focus on customized in-house applications. We also think their laptops will be just getting broken in by the end of Panasonic's three-year limited parts and labor warranty.

Performance
Panasonic Toughbook CF-31 We also think that most Toughbook users aren't interested in raw speed—they're more concerned with whether their laptops can withstand drops from three feet while operating (ours did, with no ill effects aside from the display flopping down) or other abuse (such as standing on ours). That said, the dual-core Core i5-540M-equipped CF-31 with 4GB of RAM proved to be no speed demon, but a tolerable, faster-than-a-netbook performer for everyday purposes.

Its PCMark 7 score of 1,386 trailed newer-CPU'd, business-rugged portables such as the HP EliteBook 2560p (Best Deal: $1,099.99 at TigerDirect.com) (2,640) and Panasonic's own Toughbook CF-S10 (Best Deal: $2,135.46 at 2020_PC) (2,164). Its Handbrake video-encoding time of 2 minutes 11 seconds tied the Dell Latitude E6420-ATG (Best Deal: $5,043.00 at Dell SMB), while its 32-bit Photoshop CS5 time of 6:06 suffered by comparison to laptops running the 64-bit version of Adobe's image editor.

The Radeon HD 5650 discrete graphics helped the CF-31 to a playable 33.8 frames per second in Crysis at medium quality settings, though it missed the 30-fps threshold (23.3 fps) in Lost Planet 2 and fell to an unplayable 8.4 and 14.5 fps in the two titles, respectively, at high quality settings.

The CF-31 has a hefty 91Wh battery pack, which lasted a respectable 6 hours 8 minutes in our MobileMark 2007 rundown test. That's three hours shy of the exceptional Toughbook CF-S10 time, but ahead of the Dell Latitude E6420-XFR.

For most laptop shoppers, the Panasonic Toughbook CF-31 is almost off the charts both application- and budget-wise; the company makes semi-rugged and business-rugged Toughbooks with more mass-market appeal. But for professionals who need its extreme durability, it's a rock-solid (almost literally) choice.

MSI GT70 0NC-011US

All the motivational posters in PC Labs say, "Press the Turbo Button." The MSI GT70 model 0NC-011US ($1,999.99 direct) laptop has a button for what the company calls its Turbo Drive Engine that purports to give extra graphics performance. We tried the button (which only works under AC, not battery, power) and found it gave anywhere from a 0 percent to 4 percent boost in gaming benchmark scores. We also found that, when it comes to discussing the MSI GT70's speed and engineering features, it ranks well down the list.

Priced $600 below the MSI GT783-625US that copped an Editors' Choice for under-$3,000 gaming laptops less than two months ago, the GT70 flaunts one of Intel's brand-new, third-generation Core "Ivy Bridge" processors, the 2.3GHz Core i7-3610QM quad-core, along with 16GB of DDR3 memory and a particularly hardcore storage system: Its 750GB, 7,200-rpm hard drive is relegated to second-banana status behind a pair of 64GB SanDisk U100 solid-state drives, yoked together under RAID 0 for blazing speed. Add Nvidia GeForce GTX 670M graphics, a SteelSeries multicolor backlit keyboard, and a Qualcomm Atheros Killer E2200 Gigabit Ethernet adapter that promises to optimize gaming throughput at LAN parties, and you've got a ton of hardware for your two grand. Or 8.3 pounds of hardware, anyway.

Design
The MSI GT70 Best Deal: %displayPrice% at %seller% has a handsome, typically bulky (2.2 by 16.9 by 11.3 inches, HWD) black case with brushed aluminum lid and palm rest and plastic sides and bottom. A light-up MSI logo mid-lid serves to intimidate, or at least inform, your opponents.

The glossy plastic around the 17.3-inch screen is somewhat reflective, but the matte-finish display itself is not. It's a full HD (1,920 by 1,080) panel with vivid colors, jet blacks, and ample brightness. MSI ships the system with text and icons set to 125 percent size for squint-free viewing, but you can change them back to 100 percent via Windows' Control Panel.

The black tile- or chiclet-style keyboard offers a first-class, slightly clicky typing feel and full-sized numeric keypad, though we were disappointed that Home and End are doubled up on the PgUp and PgDn keys. There is no context-menu key, either; the Windows key is moved to its place, out of gamers' way. While there are no special gaming keys, the SteelSeries keyboard supports up to 10 simultaneous key actions as well as left, center, and right backlighting zones; a supplied utility lets you choose backlight colors or wavy or pulsating ("breathing") light effects. The touchpad and its twin mouse buttons work smoothly.

Touch-sensitive LEDs above the keyboard include the aforementioned Turbo Drive button; a Cooler Boost button that increases fan speed—causing cacophonous fan noise—when the action gets hot and heavy; keyboard backlight and Wi-Fi toggles; a screen blanker; and the eject button for the Blu-ray burner. Some of these, like the options in an S-Bar software utility/program launcher that hovers at the top of the screen, duplicate items on the function keys. Always looking to pare down bloatware, we turned off S-Bar, only to find the optical drive eject button stopped working and there's no physical button on the drive itself. At least right-clicking the drive and selecting Eject in Windows Explorer still worked.

Features
Next to the Blu-ray drive on the MSI's right side are two USB 2.0 ports, with three USB 3.0 ports plus a memory-card reader and four audio jacks—headphone, microphone, line-in, and line-out—on the laptop's left. At the rear are VGA, HDMI, eSATA, and Ethernet ports.

Windows 7 Home Premium and the GT70's software preload—a handful of utilities, Microsoft Office and Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security trials, and Magix photo, video, and music managers—leave 70GB of the RAID SSD drive C: available. A recovery partition leaves 687GB free of the D: hard drive. MSI backs the GT70 with a two-year limited warranty.

Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) is missing, but Bluetooth and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi are present on the wireless front. Two Dynaudio speakers and a subwoofer crank out fairly loud, fairly bass-worthy sound.

Performance
MSI GT70 0NC-011US The MSI GT70 is a productivity and general performance benchmark monster. Its Core i7-3610QM processor powered the laptop to a Cinebench R11.5 score of 6.26, within hailing distance of the mighty and pricey Alienware M18x's 6.52, while its dual SSDs contributed to a sky-high PCMark 7 score of 4,375, topping even the 4,099 of its GT783-625US Best Deal: %displayPrice% at %seller% sibling.