Acer Iconia Touchbook With Dual Screen

Acer Iconia laptop is certainly unique. The machine features two 14-inch touchscreens instead of the tried and true screen-and-keyboard combination, while retaining the same form factor as a standard laptop.

The bottom touchscreen is home to the Acer Ring, which is activated by touching all five fingers to the glass. Then you select from a handful of programs designed to take advantage of the two screens.

There’s a dual-screen Internet Explorer web browser with touch scrolling and the ability to crop and save snippets of web pages. The picture viewer is laid out similarly to the video player and includes the ability to rotate, pinch, zoom and navigate through photos using multi-touch gestures. There’s also a digital scrapbooking app, which is nice for design ideas or other artsy projects.

The two screens affect the Iconia’s battery life tremendously, as well. You’ll be lucky to get anything more than a couple hours out of it before you need to recharge. And though it likely doesn’t need to be said, an onscreen keyboard is no substitute for a real keyboard. The Iconia’s touch keyboard works okay for simple typing but don’t expect to get any real work done unless you use an external keyboard and mouse. The second screen makes the computer heavy, thick and expensive while still stripping out features relatively common to heavy, thick 14-inch laptops. There’s no optical drive, for instance, and there’s not even a memory card reader. It’s an external USB device.

So as a portable computer, the Iconia stumbles. It’s too big, the battery life is too short, and the keyboard can’t get any real work done. But as a desktop replacement that you leave plugged in all the time, the Iconia is actually kind of compelling.