Acer Chromebook Tab 10 Review - ChromeOS Tablet With Android and Linux Support By Lon.TV

Hey everybody, it's Lon Madman, and we're taking a look today at a unique tablet from Acer. They call this one, the Chromebook Tab 10, and it's called a Chromebook because it is running Chrome OS, but you can also install Android apps on it too. We've got the Google Play Store up here right now, we're going to be taking a closer look at this Chromebook and what makes it so unique in just a minute, but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds. All the opinions you're about to hear are my own. Nobody is paying for this review and no one has reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded. So let's get into it now and take a look at what this tablet is all about.

So let's take a closer look now at the hardware these sell for about three hundred and twenty dollars or so new. This one I picked up for a little less than that used on eBay, but it was a good deal. So I grabbed one. So you can see what it's all about nine point: seven inch display on this one: it's an IPS display with nice viewing angles. It's also a high DPI display, because the resolution is 2048 by 1536 or 264 pixels per inch and as a result, things look really nice and sharp on here.

Both the text and the photos similar to what you might find on an iPad with their Retina displays. So they did a nice job overall with that inside it's got a rack ship, OK, $33.99 processor. This is the same chip we saw in the Asus Chromebook Flip. We looked at a few months ago. I'll put a review link down below, so you can check that out.

It really performs about the same that that one does include support for Linux apps, which we'll talk about a little later in the review. Here. It has four gigabytes of RAM and 32 gigabytes of storage. Furthermore, it weighs about 1.2 pounds or 544 grams. Furthermore, it's all plastic, though so I don't really suggest wrapping this, which I wouldn't suggest anyhow, but you certainly don't want to drop this one I think it might be prone to sun damage just given.

Furthermore, it doesn't feel the sturdiest design here that I have seen now battery life on this one. We estimate to be about nine hours, and that is assuming you're doing the basics here, like web browsing and email and that sort of thing, when you start branching out into Android apps and into Linux apps thing, we'll change, because those typically will hit the processor a lot harder than a web browsing session will, so the usage will vary based on what your individual activities are with the device. That's one of the cool things about Chrome OS is that it's really developing in a nice way, and they're doing a lot on what are essentially mobile processors like what's in here, so you've got Android access, chrome access and now Linux too, and I think it's just such a great platform, but the really cool stuff will probably eat into that battery a bit more, especially as those things are still working. Their way through the beta process, at the time that I'm recording this video now there are not many ports on here, but one of them is very interesting before we get to that interesting port. There are some other standbys that we usually look for.

One is the micro SD card slot on here to augment its onboard storage. So if you have media or other stuff, you want to carry around with you, you can snap a card inside that slot there and get a little more storage. You have a volume rocker here and a standby switch on the top is a traditional headphone microphone jack there, but there's also a built-in microphone for conferencing and that sort of thing you do have a pair of stereo speakers, there's one on this side and one on the other side here at the bottom. They don't sound all that great, but you do get some stereo separation out of it. I was funny, though, is the orientation of them.

So this one is on the bottom here on the left-hand side and on the right-hand side it's over towards the top there's nothing on this side of the tablet. But at the bottom is this USB-C port- and this is a full service port. So you can actually connect up displays and have power going in at the same time as well as using additional USB devices, you can actually hook up a USB-C dock to this thing and get off and running with it. We're going to show you how that port works in a little. I want to show the performance of this first, because there are some caveats with this particular tablet and how it acts as a desktop when it is plugged in it's mostly related to some Chrome OS bugs at the moment, and I want to spend some time on that.

So we're going to come back to that port and show you how all of that works in just a second. But first I want to show you some basic performance examples here. We've got the NASA. gov website up and, as you can see, it is pretty smooth to scroll around on pages. Do seem to render relatively quickly on here too.

So it is a very nice browsing experience. This is something we've seen on other rock ship powered devices like this one. It really is a very snappy and high-performing kind of web browser here, at least for doing casual types of tasks and on the browser bench onyx phenomena test. We got a score of 39 point 4 on the 1.0 version of that test, along with twenty-two point: eight one on version 2.0 that came right in line with what we saw out of the Asus Chromebook Flip that we looked at a few months ago. That of course, is powered by the same processor, and it actually does better than what we saw on the Acer Chromebook 11 running with an Intel processor.

So these chips are very well tuned for the kinds of things that you will do with a Chromebook at this price point, and it also does a nice job with Android apps, including many casual Android games. So we have Cross road here running at full screen at a very decent frame rate. Here it looks nice and sharp and no real issues with slowdown or anything else like that. So not too bad of an experience here to play these kinds of games. We've seen in the past that some Android arcade and video game emulators all seem to work pretty well on here.

?, usually around the 8 and 16-bit era, is what I recommend so generally, it's a not a bad little replacement for Android as a tablet platform, because you get all the functionality that you want out of a Chrome OS device, along with the ability to play some of these Android apps as well. So I thought that was fairly well executed on here, as it has been with other Chrome OS devices, and they keep making improvements to Android 2. There are some glitches that you'll encounter. So, for example, if we try to change the screen orientation that might mess everything up here for a while, as you can see, so there are certain things that don't execute all that. Well, just yet, but as long as you start the game in a certain screen orientation, it should hold still, but again there are some glitches that you'll encounter here along the way.

Now we also got an Android gaming benchmark test to run on. Here we got a score of 1247 on the 3dmark slingshot test, it's very close to what we saw on the Chromebook Flip running with the same processor. The score looks a little higher, but when you dig into the numbers there you can see they are very similar in overall performance, so it's pretty much kind of a mid to high-end Android tablet and how it performs. But you do, of course, have the flexibility of many operating systems. Now that you can run on this device- and another thing you might want to explore when you're running Android apps are things that might make use of a stylus, because there is a stylus built into the Chromebook here on the bottom.

You can pull it out like. So it's not the most comfortable stylus out there, it's a bit of a square thing, but it does seem to work fairly well at basic stylus applications. So I can go in here and maybe load up incredible, which is an app that some folks have been using on the Android platform here and let's get into it here and just start writing some stuff on here. I did find that it does a pretty decent job of risk detection as well. The stylus doesn't seem to have too much latency there.

It's not going to match what you might see on an iPad Pro or on the Windows platform, but it does work fairly. Well, it's really secured quite nicely on the bottom of the tablet, and it's always with you too, and by and large I found the tablet experience to be usable on here, and they've also integrated some stylus input into the Chrome OS operating system when you're on web pages and other chrome based things. And if you go into the keyboard here, and you hit on these little dots at the bottom, you can switch over to stylus mode and what you can do is just write things out, and it will recognize your handwriting and give you some different options there, and you can just click on the word you want. It will insert that there's a little space bar icon next to it and as you're right it just kind of guesses that what you're doing, and you can go ahead and usually cut your text inserted there and move on not always the most efficient way to input stuff. But if you don't want to poke at the screen too much with your stylus and would rather write things out.

There is a mechanism for doing that. There are also at the bottom of the screen here. Let me just get rid of the keyboard for a second. There is a stylus option here at the bottom, where you can do things like capture a region of the screen, for example. So I can maybe grab this and do a quick screenshot which will save into my photo album.

For example, there's also the ability too just to copy it to the clipboard can even jump into this and put some annotations on it. So it's going to load up that image. I just did, and I can circle this and say fix it and kind of move on from there. So there's some cool stuff that you can do here with the stylus both on the Android side, but also on the Chrome OS side of the device now I do want to talk about, though what happens when you try to plug a keyboard or a mouse into this thing, because unfortunately it looks like this is kind of a unique device in the Chrome OS lineup and right now, it's not working all that well, when you're trying to switch in and out of some kind of desktop mode with other input devices. So let's explore that we're going to start with the USB-C port, and then we'll look at maybe a Bluetooth keyboard ? all right! So I've got two tablets out here on a stand in landscape mode.

We've got power going into this adapter from the Acer power adapter HDMI out to the monitor here, and I've got a dongle for this keyboard, trackpad combo here, and I'm just going to plug this in to the USB-C port on the tablet, and it just started charging, so we're getting power in I am getting a low power warning, though, when I do attach that and then the display comes up here looks a little washed out on camera, but it actually looks good, like this display typically looks, but you'll notice here that the display orientation on the tablet is not responding to moving it around. Here, it's not automatically readjusting itself and I found. The solution is to go into the settings and then go over to orientation 90, and what this will do is set this tablet now for whenever it is plugged in. So, if I disconnect the cable here, it will revert most of the time to tablet mode. Sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes it does so. I'll pull this out here. One thing that I did notice it do is basically sit at a dark screen for sometimes up to a minute before it comes back on. So it's very slowly. Switching out of this desktop mode back to tablet mode when it does finally come back, it does seem to work fine as a tablet, but it just feels not complete to me.

That's why I was mentioning it was so quirky here you can see now it's properly getting the screen oriented its back into its tablet mode, where everything is full screen, but again it takes it a while to get back into that mode and, if I were to, for example, maybe try to plug it in while we're in a landscape orientation. It's now going to flip the screen, basically to what I had set up before. As you can see. So it's not going to again smartly know the position of the screen. I had a bigger issue, though with Bluetooth keyboards.

Let's take a look at that. Alright, so I've got this Bluetooth keyboard, trackpad combo, here I'm, going to pair this up now and once it connects. Let me just type in the code here once it connects it's going to once again put this tablet into the desktop mode, and you can see it reverted it to the screen. Setting I had earlier it something to slip it back around here. So what's cool is that I can actually operate this as a desktop.

Now my mouse pointer is upside down. It's really a little crazy right now how this thing is not working properly and then what will happen here is that even if I disconnect Bluetooth completely so, for example, if I go here and just turn off Bluetooth, it stays in this desktop mode. So it becomes really difficult to operate the tablet, because all of those tablet features we were running with before, like the auto screen orientation and the full screen. All of that stuff goes away. Even the power button here doesn't work properly.

I can only just turn off the tablet completely I can't put it back to sleep and there's really no way to extract it out of this mode after you connect up a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it just stays in this until you reboot it again, and that was a little problematic for me. But one thing that did work very well on here: are Linux apps? This is one of the chrome devices that supports this new crossing feature which boots up a Linux container on your Chrome OS device, and you can install a bunch of stuff and run it, and it did work fairly well. The one issue I ran into, though, is that when you have the tablet in tablet mode, which means everything is running in full screen, it does have an issue with apps that use multiple windows like which often puts your tools. Up on these little side, windows I was putting all of those tool windows up as full screen windows, I had to switch back and forth to go back and forth on those things. So when I got the Bluetooth keyboard connected, it reverted to desktop mode.

That supports windowing essentially, and that app did run a little for me. But overall, the performance of the Linux applications is fairly close, almost identical to what I experienced on the Chromebook Flip, and you can see more about that in a video I posted a few weeks ago that details the Linux feature in more detail if you're curious about how things work. So you definitely want to get this tablet out of tablet mode when you're doing that Linux stuff, so that you can get multiple windows and everything else going on it. I believe there is a way to disable tablet mode on these tablets, but you have to dig into some extra settings there to do that. There's no consumer option just to click a box at the moment to get that working properly, but altogether I.

Think it's a fairly nice chrome tablet, I really like where things might go with Chrome OS, especially as it relates to Android and Linux applications, and I am pretty optimistic about the shift here in Google's focus to making larger tablets running Chrome OS, because it really is going to give us a lot of opportunity for some really lightweight but very functional computing in the very near future. Android Linux, chrome, OS, all on a fairly low powered and low-cost device is pretty exciting. This is a little on the expensive side now, especially when you can pick up a Windows Device like the surface, go for around the same price, but if you are really interested in where Chrome OS is headed, and you can pick up one of these for 300 bucks used or something give it a shot. I think it's something really fun to play with, and I think a real window into what the future of portable computing might be from Google lots more to see on this I'm sure in the future and until next time this is LAN Simon. Thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lime TV supporters, including gold level supporters, Chris allegretto, the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht Gerard New berg in Cali, a Kumar.

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Source : Lon.TV