Price R15,000
Dual screen notebooks are nothing new. Toshiba’s ill-fated Libretto W100 7” netbook attempted to replace the ubiquitous keyboard with a touch screen and failed. Acer has evidently decided it can succeed where others have not and has introduced the Acer Iconia. The Iconia is a dual capacitive touch screen 14” ‘touchbook’ equipped with an Intel Core i5 and 4GB of memory. The lack of an optical drive and limited number of ports and slots make this device more akin to a netbook than a full-feature notebook.
The traditional keyboard and touch pad are replaced with virtual representations which work to a degree. Enthusiastically touch-typing on the virtual keyboard results in sentences riddled with spelling errors and lingering questions about what you were trying to type. While the virtual keyboard is atrocious, the virtual mouse touch pad is a dream to use and blows everything else out the water. At full tilt with the screens at maximum brightness and both touch surfaces in use, the battery will be gone in just under three hours.
Even the proprietary software which places user interface for browsing multimedia and social networks on the bottom screen does little to improve the overall appeal of this notebook. Had Acer built a notebook with just one of these amazing touch screens and opted for a decent physical keyboard and touch pad then that would be a notebook worthy of interest. The Iconia, while a great proof-of-concept, is ill-suited for the needs of general daily use.
Michael Reed
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