Between large-screen phones (sometimes described with the ridiculous term "phablet"), 7-inch Android tablets, and the excellent iPad Mini, it would seem that Windows 8 has been forced to carve out its territory in relatively larger screen sizes. Most of the Windows 8 tablets and hybrids we've seen to date have had 11.6-inch to 13-inch screens, with just a couple of minor outliers on either side.
Acer Iconia W3
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
One thing we haven't seen yet is a truly palm-size Windows 8 touch-screen device -- until the Acer Iconia W3, an 8-inch Windows 8 tablet that pairs with a $79 keyboard dock to form a micro version of a desktop all-in-one PC (we tested the $429.99 version, the W3-810-1650, which has a 64GB solid-state drive-- a 32GB SSD version is $379.99).
Prior to Windows 8, it had been several years since I'd seen a Windows touch-screen PC this small. There was a brief moment when small devices called UMPCs (ultramobile PCs) were in vogue, but both the sub-Netbook hardware and pre-Win-8 software were far from ready for prime time.
Because of this, I was dubious about the idea of an 8-inch Windows 8 tablet -- something like the 10-inch ThinkPad Tablet 2 from Lenovo seemed to be about as small as one would want to get. But, I must admit that in the hand, the Acer W3 works well as a portable full-featured PC. Like the original iPad (remember how skeptical everyone was about that?), this is a product that comes off better in person than on paper.
It's lightweight and slim, and the tile-based Windows 8 scales well to the smaller screen. This turns out to be a great size for one-viewer video playback (via Netflix, for example), or the Windows 8 News app. A microSD card slot and HDMI and USB ports keep the tablet from feeling too disconnected, and the battery life isn't bad at all.
The news is not all good, however. The low-res screen (an unusual 1,280x800 pixels) is simply awful, with a gauzy coating and terrible off-axis viewing. I tried two different W3 units and ran into some buggy performance on both, including occasional screen unresponsiveness, sometimes requiring a reboot to fix. And, of course, with an Atom processor and 2GB of RAM, there are a handful of things this tablet will do well, and a whole lot it won't.
I'm tempted to give the Acer W3 the benefit of the doubt, as it's less expensive than other Windows 8 Atom tablets and hybrids we've tested, and comparing 64GB models, it's $100 less than an iPad Mini (although the iPad Mini has a lower starting price). But the poor screen and general difficulty of navigating Windows 8 on such a small screen outside of a handful of apps and tasks make this hard to recommend unless you're one of those people who think the Netbook era ended too soon.