The Acer Iconia 6120 laptop computer is one of those marquee, “halo” goods meant to draw focus to your brand around to fulfill daily computing wants. In many techniques it is a fairly regular 14-inch laptop computer. The standout characteristic, nevertheless, is its 2nd 14-inch multitouch display, which replaces the entire decrease keyboard-and-touchpad deck. As high-concept merchandise go, the Iconia is fairly affordable at $1199 (as of Might 2, 2011). Even now, at that cost it is not an excellent deal, and you might be greater off picking one thing a bit more right down to earth. Acer’s dual-touch implementation of the Windows laptop is about as good as you could expect it for being, but it can be just not an incredible thought in the first place.
You do not actually get a total large amount of computing electrical power for the $1199. The technique ships with a 2.66GHz Core i5-480M; that processor isn’t really slow, nonetheless it is portion of the earlier era of Intel Core CPUs. Acer would get greater functionality and battery lifestyle from on the list of newer Sandy Bridge designs. The Iconia also relies on Intel’s integrated graphics, which is very good for everyday desktop productivity stuff, but a bad choice for high-def video playback or 3D gaming. Here, again, the more recent era of Intel processors would help a lot. The Iconia comes standard with 4GB of pretty slow RAM, as well as the 640GB challenging push is a pokier 5400-rpm model instead of a snappier 7200-rpm drive. Within our exams all of that added up to a ho-hum WorldBench 6 score of 109. Everything is responsive sufficient when you are just checking e-mail, searching the net, or writing paperwork. Push the system with more-intensive jobs, though, and it becomes sluggish.
To match the 2nd screen, Acer plainly needed to surrender a few of the normal characteristics we assume on laptops of this measurement. You obtain HDMI and VGA ports for video output, a pair of USB 2.0 ports within the left, a USB three.0 port on the correct, headphone and microphone jacks, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and gigabit ethernet. What is lacking? Most laptops of this size and weight also possess a multiformat card reader, Bluetooth, an optical push, plus a mixture USB/eSATA port, none of which show up on the Iconia. Acer is certainly banking within the desirability of its twin touch-screen style to produce up for the shortcomings.
Because the whole bottom deck–where the keyboard, touchpad, along with other miscellaneous buttons normally reside–has been changed by a multitouch capacitive touchscreen, you do all typing on the gentle keyboard. It operates much better than I expected, but I nevertheless identified myself typing much more gradually and creating far more mistakes than I’d on the good bodily keyboard. The keyboard’s dimension makes making use of it somewhat simpler than typing on an iPad or even a related tablet, but which is faint praise. The touchpad area beneath the keyboard is oddly little, and lacks assistance for the standard gestures we’ve come to anticipate, such as two-finger scrolling. That is somewhat mind-boggling, as it is all just computer software and Acer could quickly have addressed these concerns.
Touch all five fingers to your decrease display, and you may carry up a specific hub that enables you to draw gestures, rapidly select from a number of functions, or start one of Acer’s touch-enabled apps. The touch World wide web browser spans both screens, but would not make you switch from Chrome or Firefox. The SocialJogger app reveals your Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube feeds; it operates as marketed and feels like a somewhat laggy tablet software, but you truly have no have to utilize it if you have a complete Windows laptop computer at your disposal. Precisely the same goes for that touch-based audio and picture applications. Certainly, all of them perform as explained, but they are just so…superfluous. Navigating these programs on a lower-deck touchscreen won’t help save you significant time or energy. Almost all of them would work just as properly within the upper touchscreen, and none of them are large timesavers in comparison with all the plethora of regular keyboard-and-mouse computer software out there.
When the Acer Iconia has one particular primary dilemma, it’s the reduce touchscreen comes with a whole large amount of baggage. It makes the method thick, for starters. At 1.4 inches thick, the Iconia is not enormous, but it is substantially thicker than laptops with comparable specs and no optical push. It can be fairly heavy at six pounds, also. I already talked about the missing card reader and Bluetooth. And driving two huge LCDs puts a strain to the battery, which lasted a paltry two hrs, eleven minutes within our exams. All to ensure that you can have a mediocre soft keyboard and some touch applications that never take up space around the upper display?
Acer would have been significantly far better off equipping the Iconia that has a common bodily keyboard and replacing only the touchpad with a pretty high-resolution 4-inch touchscreen. It can be very good to determine Acer making an attempt some aggressive designs, especially ones as aesthetically pleasing as being the Iconia’s, but like a sensible make a difference it just does not make sense to exchange the lower deck of the Windows laptop having a touchscreen.
Tags: PCGA-BP52AUC, BT.A0302.003, FRU 92P1169, 90-NHA1B2000, 91.47028.011, FPCBP64