Acer announced the Iconia W510 and W700 tablet at its press conference in Taipei on Monday and Pocket-lint was on hand to get a quick play with the two new Windows 8 powered tablets.

The Iconia W510

Starting with the Iconia W510, Acer was very secretive as to what hardware this new 10.1-inch tablet will be running, but confirmed it would be an Intel chip of some kind - possibly an Atom processor - but we couldn’t coax the Acer representative into admitting this.

The W510 was made out to be your travel companion, as it’s perfect for light work, entertainment and more. With an 18-hour battery life, you’re not going to run out of juice any time soon either, although it’ll be interesting to see if Acer can actually deliver on this.

As with so many other higher-end tablets, the W510 sports dual cameras with an 8Megapixel unit with an LED flash on the rear and an unspecified camera on the front.

One concern we have about the W510, judging by the unit on display, is that the hinge on the dock isn’t quite as strong as it needs to be, as when in “laptop” mode, the tablet half of the W510 was sagging backwards when left on its own.

This didn’t seem to be an problem when the keyboard was used as a stand though and it’s likely that this is just an issue with this pre-production unit, but still something worth noting.

Price-wise the Iconia W510 will be anything but a cheap tablet, as Acer has placed it somewhere between $599 and $799 making it considerably more expensive than the iPad and every other tablet on the market.

The Iconia W700

As for the Iconia W700, it will feature an Ivy Bridge processor and as such is a notebook replacement tablet. Despite sporting Thunderbolt connectivity, the docking station for the W700 relies on USB 3.0. The left-hand side of the dock sports three USB 3.0 ports courtesy of a hub and oddly enough there’s a small cut-out to make room for the rear camera on the right-hand side.

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The dock isn’t as clever as it first seems, because it simply has a removable stand that can be inserted two different ways into the dock itself and it actually looks rather cheap.

We did manage to prod the W700 for a few seconds and the build quality seems pretty good, although it’s a fairly chunky piece of kit compared to ARM-powered tablets and even its W510 sibling.

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Price-wise the W700 isn’t likely to draw a lot of consumer attention, because Acer is hoping that potential buyers are going to be willing to spend between $799 and $999, which seems far too steep considering its many limitations and rather cheap docking solution.