From our experience, there's no difference between the two displays, but only the bottom one uses a 10-finger input gesture to pop up the onscreen keyboard.

The hinge folds all the way to 180 degrees, so both screens can lie flat against the table, although that does block the bottom-mounted speakers. Both screens have glossy edge-to-edge glass with black bezels and no other buttons, controls, or accessories (except for a tiny pinhole-style Webcam above the top screen). The Iconia feels sturdy enough, but it's also too heavy and bulky to easily tote around.įlipping the clamshell open, it's almost like looking at two iPads joined together at the center hinge. Boxy to a fault, we can only imagine the engineering required to fit the two 14-inch displays in safely. The thick, heavy chassis has a light bronze lid with black accents, and is not nearly as sleek as this week's other high-end laptop, the Samsung Series 9. The Acer Iconia packs its dual screens into an unassuming package. By moving up to the current generation of CPUs, the Iconia could have faster performance, longer battery life, and better graphics. And, most annoyingly, the CPU is one of Intel's last-generation Core i5 processors. The onscreen touch pad is too small, and it lacks the kind of touch gestures a purely software touch pad could easily offer. The onscreen keyboard had a hint of a lag, although it would probably only affect the fastest of touch typists. There were still frustrations with the Iconia, however. The experience is much closer to typing on an iPad than typing on one of the many Windows tablets we've tried over the years-and that's a good thing.

Onscreen typing is still nowhere near as intuitive as the real thing, but a few generations of iPhones and iPads have trained us to tap-type without too much trouble, at least for short writing tasks.

In practice, it works better than you might expect. (We've seen a similar concept before, but with dual 7-inch screens, in the Toshiba Libetto W100.) Instead of a screen and a keyboard, the Iconia ditches the keyboard for a second screen, which can be used either as an extended desktop or for a virtual keyboard. The high-concept feature that sets the Iconia apart is actually two: two 14-inch touch screens.

Acer iconia 6120 table