At a Manhattan press event on Tuesday, Acer announced a dual-screen multitouch laptop that, while looking like a concept computer in the flesh, also looks like it's trying to get the best of two worlds at once. Iconia is a 14-inch laptop with an additional 14-inch screen where a keyboard would normally be.The twin Gorilla-glass-enforced multitouch displays seem to work like the iPad's panels, with support for 10-finger simultaneous touch.Iconia is, at its heart, a Core i5 laptop with familiar specs: up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, integrated Intel graphics, a hard drive up to 750GB, and Windows 7 Home Premium. Ports are also typical for a high-end laptop: two USB 2.0, one USB 3.0, HDMI, and VGA.
No specific availability or pricing has been announced either--Acer is calling Iconia a "concept device," which seems to place it firmly into the same experimental/expensive category that the Toshiba Libretto W105 fell into. Most importantly, we've yet to see a Windows 7 touch device that's really been easy or useful to operate. Will Iconia break the mold? We'll have to wait and see.
No specific availability or pricing has been announced either--Acer is calling Iconia a "concept device," which seems to place it firmly into the same experimental/expensive category that the Toshiba Libretto W105 fell into. Most importantly, we've yet to see a Windows 7 touch device that's really been easy or useful to operate. Will Iconia break the mold? We'll have to wait and see.
