Acer Iconia Touchbook Review

The Acer Iconia Touchbook is the only multi-touch dual-screen notebook on the market, offering a virtual keyboard, an Intel Core i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM. Chris Hardwick and Kevin Pereira review the $1600 device.

What You Need To Know

• The Acer Iconia appears to be the illegitimate child of two iPads and a ThinkPad.
• The device has two touch screens with a hinge in the middle, but the design doesn't work well for portability.
• The Iconia Touchbook weighs about 6 lbs, which is pretty bulky and heavy for a laptop.
• You can fold the Touchbook open to be completely flat.
• The entire device is touch-based, and is surprisingly easy to interact between the two screens.
• The screens were very responsible and Windows 7 is touch-friendly.
• The Iconia takes advantage of multi-touch capable apps.
• You can easily expand a window to fill two screens or move other windows between them.
• Acer also built a custom launcher and several apps including a media player and a scrapbook maker.
• The only worthwhile app is the web browser.
• The Iconia also features a virtual keyboard and touchpad.
• The onscreen keyboard is enabled by a button on the side or resting the heels of your hand on the screen.
• The touchpad works well and though the keyboard is responsive, it's nearly impossible to touch type.
• There can also be some confusion between Windows 7 has its own virtual keyboard separate from the built-in one.
• The apps that you can run to make the TouchBook worth buying is a video editor like Avid or Photoshop where you can spread everything out on two screens.
• The productivity benchmarks were actually good, meaning things like video editors, Photoshop and Microsoft Office will all run smoothly.
• Gaming is theoretically possible if you can get past the fact that there's no physical WASD.
• Unfortunately, gaming isn't its strong suit: it wouldn't even run our benchmarks because of the integrated graphics, so it's not going to run the latest and greatest games at max resolution.
• It was able to handle StarCraft at the lowest settings.

Price

• The Iconia starts at $1,600 and could be as much as $2,000 depending on the configuration.

Rating

• 2 Seals of Approval out of 5.
• It's not a bad computer if you can find a use for it.
• For us, two touchscreens seems like one touchscreen to many.