Emerging from the ashes of the Microsoft Courier project in collaboration with Microsoft, the Acer Iconia dual-touchscreen laptop really is a curious piece of kit.
Packing two 14-inch capacitive touchscreens, the Iconia is a booklet laptop-tablet hybrid device running Windows 7 Home Premium. It does away with the traditional keyboard and mouse setup in favour of an exclusively touch-based interface.
The Courier concept was radically different from all the touchscreen tablets that we've seen so far. It was designed with a journal-type interface, enabling you organise dynamically-updating web clippings, images, notes and other content in a way that was designed to make your life a lot easier to organise.
But while the Microsoft Courier was designed to be a dual-screen, portable touchscreen booklet, the Acer Iconia is an absolute monster in comparison.
While it retains the general concept of the Courier project, the Acer Iconia weighs a bulky 2.8kg, and packs some surprisingly high-end system specs. At its heart beats an Intel Core i5-480 chip, 4GB of RAM (par for the course on a Windows 7 machine), 640GB storage and a four-cell battery.
And yes you read that correctly, it's a four-cell battery. Which lasts just three hours. Yeah, we know.
Connections include Wireless N and 3G, while you can connect to a TV or third monitor using the HDMI port. There are also two USB 2.0 ports and one USB 3.0 port.
How much does it cost?
The price is also rather different to most touchcreen tablets out there. The Iconia will initially go on sale on January 15 for a rather hefty £1,499 in John Lewis stores, as well as Micra Anvika stores such as Harrods and Acer Experience Centres.
By the end of February, though, the Iconia will be available from all the other major retailers, and that price might come down at that point too – the £1,499 price point is merely a suggested figure.
Physically, the Iconia looks very similar to any other Acer laptop, but in the traditional place of the keyboard sits a second 14-inch touchscreen.
The two screens are divorced by about two inches in total, so while the Windows desktop extends across both panels, it's not quite as slick and seamless as you might expect.
Acer has attempted to join the two screens together and make the Windows 7 interface more manageable by using its own overlay called the Acer Ring, which appears on the bottom screen.
The Acer Ring is akin to the Start Menu for the Iconia's socially-designed touchscreen features. To call it up, you place all the fingertips on one hand onto the screen. It pops up on the bottom panel, and from here you have access to all the goodies that make this device so interesting.
Shortcut gestures
The Iconia uses touch gestures to help you navigate to the menus and the content without having to clunk your way through the standard Windows interface. Users of mouse gestures will already be very familiar with this sort of system.
They're all customisable, and you can set a touch gesture for pretty much anything. Using the Acer Ring, you programme your gesture in – it can be anything from placing two fingers on the screen, to drawing a stickman – and you can set that to open any file, menu, URL, programme, application etc.
The gestures do, though, all have to be one continuous drawing, as soon as you lift your finger, the gesture is finished.
There are two gestures which you can't change. They're the 'summon keyboard' gesture which is to place both palms flat on the bottom screen, and the 'summon the Acer Ring' gesture which is to place all five fingers of one hand on the screen in a sort of claw shape.
Media
From within the Acer Ring, you have access to all your music, videos and pictures. This means you can access your media again without having to fiddle your way through the Windows menus with your fingers. Windows 7 has never been be a comfortable OS for touch and it never will be, so the fact that Acer has endeavoured to bypass most of the Windows navigation is a good thing.
However, whenever you do end up having to dip your fingers back into vanilla Windows 7, the user experience is a bit painful – but we'll get to that in a minute.
If you're watching a video, you're able to switch off the screen you're not using, or turn the brightness down, using the Acer Ring. So while that three hours of battery life is limited to say the least, you can at least manage that three hours in any way you'd want to.
In general, the media features work well, but we're not sure we'd want to pass up using MPC or VLC in favour of the Acer software. And that's the problem with a lot of the features on offer here.
Scrapbook and journal
Using the Acer Ring you can capture content in your scrapbook and your journal.
You literally select an area of the screen, say a section on TechRadar.com, and then tell the Acer Ring where you want to send that snapshot.
If you send it to your scrapbook, it'll stay as-is as an image, and you can then flip, rotate, zoom and annotate at will. Your scrapbook ends up being pages of layered up bits and bobs and it's useful if you see a cool picture on a site which you want to save.
Ideal if you're a student, as it enables you to compile notes and research in one place. That £1,499 is hardly student-friendly, though.
Journal
The journal behaves slightly differently in that the content you capture to it updates itself dynamically.
So if you save a screenshot of a section of TechRadar to your journal, it will always stay up to date. So say you saved the TechRadar carousel at the top of our homepage, you'd be able to go back to your journal at any time and see what that carousel looks like – and it'll always be up to date.
It's an interesting way of keeping in touch with your favourite sites without having to load up entire web pages in sequence. This is the sort of functionality at the heart of Microsoft's Courier project and you can see that Acer has collaborated heavily with Microsoft in the creation of this product.
Keyboard
The keyboard is actually quite comfortable to type on. It's big enough that you'd be able to avoid hitting the wrong keys too often etc, but it's not what we'd call perfect, either.
There are no legs under the laptop, which means the bottom screen is completely flat. This is not ideal for anyone planning to do a lot of typing – in fact it's akin to a one-way ticket to RSI Hell. It would be a lot easier to use with a tilted laptop dock – but again, doesn't that defeat the point?
One cool feature is that you can actually customise the on-screen keyboard by using skins, and you can change the size, key layout etc.
If you want to bypass the keyboard completely, you can use the built-in handwriting recognition to get your words on-screen. It worked surprisingly well in our test, although again the lack of a frictionless surface made handwriting on the screen a bit of a pain.
Underneath the keyboard is a touch trackpad, so if you want to use the Acer Iconia as a standard laptop you can. Because it's made of glass though, the trackpad isn't particularly smooth and it's a pain to use.
Finger prints are a problem generally, especially when some of the core features of the Iconia demand that you put your two hands all over the bottom screen quite regularly.
Social networking
Another feature available from the Acer Ring is a social networking hub that pulls a feed in from any of the big social sites. So you can have you Facebook, YouTube and Twitter feeds, for example, available to you without you needing to install a client such as TweetDeck.
The version of the Iconia that we saw was distinctly lacking in optimised features for each service, and it absolutely does not rival the likes of Tweetdeck on functionality. But during our test, Acer went to great lengths to stress that we were playing with a prototype and that it's all still being improved back at Acer HQ.
While the Acer Iconia is undoubtedly an exciting piece of kit, we don't think it quite matches up to the promise of Microsoft's Courier concept.
For a start, it's one bulky mother of a laptop. At 2.8kg it's hardly portable, and isn't that the point of a touchscreen tablet device?
Sure this isn't a tablet like the Apple iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but why remove the keyboard and mouse, add a touchscreen keyboard, and then put it all together in a device exactly the same size and weight of a standard office laptop?
It makes no sense to us. Navigating the web using Internet Explorer in Windows 7 cannot get any easier than using a keyboard and mouse. Introducing touch into the equation simply makes things more difficult.
We really like the Acer Ring overlay, and the scrapbooks and journals are a really interesting and new way of digesting your daily helping of web info. But is it easier than just putting some shortcuts in your favourites bar in Firefox? We have our significant doubts.
We liked:
The software that Acer has put together for this product is fantastic. It works well, and barring the odd bit of lag, which we can probably put down to this being an incomplete prototype, it does a good job of living up to the promise of Microsoft Courier.
The onscreen keyboard is nice, and the customisations are a nice touch. It's also really cool to have a web page spreading across two top-to-bottom screens.
We disliked:
The three-hour battery life is a bit of a joke. Running a Core i5 CPU simultaneously with two bright touchscreens is always going to be extremely taxing on any battery. Acer could no doubt have put a bigger battery in, but that would have made the product even heavier. The whole thing reeks of compromise.
That leads us to the form factor, which is also an enormous drawback – it's just too big, heavy and cumbersome. To be a truly revolutionary product, the Iconia needed to be smaller, slimmer – portable basically. And portable this ain't.
The other major inevitable drawback is the inclusion of Windows 7. It's just not an operating system that's ever going to lend itself to an intuitive touch experience.
The Acer Ring overlay is slick, but as soon as you have to go back into the regular Windows interface, the joy ends and the pain begins.
The final glaring omission is the ability to swivel the top screen round and fold it back down to create a tablet. This feature is already included in so many touchscreen tablets out there, it's just so disappointing that Acer has left it out.
Oh, and did we mention the price?
Verdict:
The Acer Iconia is going to be big. In fact, it might well be massive. But it's not going to be this version. It might not even be version two that really hits the spot.
Acer is going to have to slim things down, improve battery life and ditch Windows 7 before this becomes anything like a usable, mass market product.
Maybe when Microsoft has launched its embedded touch OS, there will be a proper platform for products like this to thrive on. But until then, while there are lots of things to like about the Iconia, there are just too many things to hate.
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