Acer, one of the world’s leading laptop brands has recently brought out its beloved dual touch screen laptop, called the Iconia. This means that the laptop has double touch screens, both being of 14 inches.  Initially laptops did not have touch screens, but the Iconia has the main screen as a touch screen so you don’t have to bother using the mouse or the keyboard much. The second touch screen is present on the keyboard itself.

Features

The two touch screens have HD features enabled and they are at a resolution of 1366 x 768 and have multiple touch features. Therefore you don’t really have to type on a hard keyboard the way it is conventionally done. Typing would be entirely touch screen based. Apart from the typing benefit, you could also use the double screen feature to view a document in its full length something which you had to initially accomplish through moving the scroll keys. With the double touch screen you can extend the page for better viewing. Moreover, you can have two different apps running at the same time on the two screens!! Truly innovative for a laptop, we must say!

Functionality

In order to get some functions working, you would have to learn a few symbolic gestures that are recognized by the touch sensitive screen. This would be taught in the instructions manual, so you do need to go through that. A strong grabbing gesture on the bottom touch screen would enable the Acer Ring Media player to pop up. Similarly different gestures used towards the touch sensitivity screens would bring up different feature sets.

You are also given the option to rotate the media ring to give you more functionality towards other functions such as a favorite social networking site, audio, video, pictures and browsers. If learning gestures is frustrating for you, then you can also create your own unique gestures from the Gesture Editor. The Acer Iconia seems to be the next genre of laptops!

Performance

Enough said of the design and features, now we come up towards the performance of the laptop. The device may look cool enough with dual touch screens however, it suffers from slow processing. Also it is great for people who don’t tend to use the keyboard much, but for professional writers and keyboard users, this laptop could be a disappointment as you really cannot type virtually for long end documents.  The Iconia acts more of an advanced tablet rather than a full fledged laptop. The laptop comes with Core i5 processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM, Intel graphics and a 750GB hard drive with the Windows 7 Home Premium as its operating system. It supports two USB ports, a HDMI port and a VGA.

Bottom Line

The Acer Iconia is not yet a full-fledged laptop, as per the company, the laptop is a “concept based device” which means that it still has to go through numerous experiments and experiences. So, you could wait for a while and use the traditional laptop until Acer makes the laptop a perfect usability device.