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Acer Iconia Video
Acer Iconia Video Transcript
-This is something we first saw at a sneak peek back in December, but they're really showing it off here in CES, so-- -This is amazing. -We're calling it a CES laptop. This is the Acer Iconia which is a dual touchscreen 14-inch laptop. There was a dual touchscreen Toshiba that was kind of cool. It was a Libretto but that was-- those were 2 tiny, I think, 9-inch screens or 7-inch screens. -Yeah, it was small. -Okay, so this is gonna detect when I take my 10 fingers and put them on the screen and it's gonna pop up a keyboard. It knows when I put all 10 fingers down, I want the keyboard. Otherwise, it'll let me just use the bottom screen as a touchscreen and you can have a web browser window--have it on the top, have it on the bottom--either way. But it knows that if you put 10 fingers down, that means you wanna type. And if I take 5 fingers and I put them down like this, it's gonna call up kind of a media jog wheel, so it has a bunch of control interfaces programmed in, they're gonna react based on, you know, what kind of finger configuration you put down; and once you learn those, you know, 10 fingers seem pretty easy on your number 5 fingers. If they get more complicated than that then it may not get as useful. But those two basic-- -It's a little-- it's a little more complicated than starting to type. -Yes, exactly. -Like that. -But almost if you put your fingers down like you're about to start to type, then the keyboard pops out. -Right. -And, you know what? When I checked it out a greater length back in December when they first showed it off in New York at a very brief sneak peek, I thought it actually worked fairly smoothly. Whether it works long-term in terms of being practical, the type-on remains to be seen, but I have become a very adept iPad typist, so I am now convinced that there is a way to do on-screen typing well. It's almost as if we take a regular laptop and when we're not actually using the keyboard, it can just disappear and be something else useful. -Okay. -Now, but whether it'll ever be a mainstream thing, who knows? But I think it's a clever concept. -But it's almost like, you know, having two monitors with your desktop, for example. -Right. I think it's going to be about a thousand bucks as premium laptops of this size are. You know, it is kind of a concept car piece, though. It's not your everyday practical laptop, but there's always those things for people who want to show off these. We call them like CEO laptops in a way. -Right. -Or a coffee shop show-off laptops. You know, 'cause there's always a guy with a Lamborghini- or Ferrari-branded laptop in the coffee shop. -It might be one of those things where when you start using it, I can imagine getting completely hooked 'cause we are a multitasking world these days. -That's exactly it and that is the Acer Iconia.
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Acer ICONIA 6120 Dual-Screen Touchbook - 14" - Core i5 480M - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit - 4 GB RAM - 640 GB HDD Review
The good: The Acer Iconia's innovative dual-touch-screen design and virtual keyboard work better than you'd expect, and unlike other dual-screen PCs we've seen, this one has enough CPU power for everyday tasks.
The bad: Speed typists will find that the virtual keyboard has a hint of a lag, and its (virtual) touch pad is needlessly small. It's also saddled with last year's Intel CPUs, rather than the latest generation, which might have given it better battery life.
The bottom line: Unlike a lot of other unique proof-of-concept laptops, the Acer Iconia is fun to use and largely works as advertised. But it has a hard time answering the most frequent question we hear about it: why would anyone need a dual-touch-screen laptop?
Acer ICONIA 6120 Dual-Screen Touchbook - 14" - Core i5 480M - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit - 4 GB RAM - 640 GB HDD Specs
Manufacturer: Acer
Part number: CNETIconia
- Product Specifications
Acer ICONIA 6120 Dual-Screen Touchbook - 14" - Core i5 480M - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit - 4 GB RAM - 640 GB HDD Prices
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