No Keyboard? No Problem: Acer's Dual-Touchscreen Iconia Oozes Coolness

Acer Iconia with dual 14-inch touchscreens

Is the Acer Iconia the opening salvo of a new generation of keyboard-free notebooks or just a grand experiment doomed to be a footnote in the annals of PC history? It's certainly too early to tell, but there's one thing that can be said about the new dual-touchscreen unit: It's just darn cool.

With no visible moving parts other than the hinge connecting the two bright 14-inch touchscreens, the Iconia is a sleek, clean-looking computing machine with nifty enhancements to the standard Windows interface.

You can navigate through your browser, word processor and other software with your finger as you would on an Apple iPad or other tablet, but if you lay both palms upon the lower touch screen, a full size keyboard appears, including a virtual touchpad, thus allowing you to work as if it were a conventional notebook.

Acer Iconia with virtual keyboard

The unit, and a handful of other new mobile devices, was introduced by Acer Tuesday at a spiffy New York press event which included a white runway more suited for fashion models than computer company executives.

Both of the LED-backlit14-inch LCD touchscreens offer a resolution of 1,366 by 768 pixels and come with a protective layer of Gorilla Glass, a scratch and crack-resistant composite glass developed by Corning, which is based appropriately enough in Corning, New York.

Acer Groups Senior Corp. VP Jim Wong watches demo 

The full-size keyboard not only offers all of the keys of a standard keyboard, but can do some tricks that a hardware keyboard can't. For example, once you touch the virtual touchpad below the virtual keyboard, the entire bottom screen becomes your touchpad as long as you don't lift your finger. Instead of dragging your finger in short bursts across a two-inch square, you can use the entire real estate of the 14-inch display to propel the cursor around the top screen.

The Paper PC on the Iconia

Touching the keyboard with five fingers and then giving the screen a twist causes the Acer Ring, a circular, scrollable group of one-touch application cards, to appear.

In practice the keyboard worked fairly well, requiring no more practice than one would need to use the virtual keyboard on an iPad or other tablet. The lower section can be used for generously sized system configuration screens--a boon for those with aging eyes.

The lack of a hardware keyboard allows for a very slim profile and of course, a very quiet notebook. The unit will be built with Intel's i5 family of processors, but other configuration information wasn't immediately announced.

A key question went unanswered Tuesday: The price. Acer officials said it had not been finalized yet. While Acer said that the unit may be available as soon as late this year, no sale date was given.

So is this the beginning of the end of the keyboard as we know it? Not quite. The lack of haptic feedback or the reassuring bounce-back of a physical keyboard may cause even good touch-typers to constantly look at the virtual keyboard instead of the screen. However the Iconia's dual screens brings the concept of a lightweight, but very rugged notebook with a weatherproof display and keyboard closer to reality.

So the question is: Would you buy something like this as your primary laptop? Chime in.



Top two product photos courtesy of Acer
Text and other photos and video Copyright 2010 Stadium Circle Features

HP Photosmart eStation: Take One ‘Tablet’ and Call Me When My Boarding Pass is Ready

All-in-one inkjet printer has a detachable Android-based color control panel which looks and acts like a tablet, but isn’t.

So what can you get in a $399 all-in-one printer in 2010? Answer: The HP Photosmart eStation, a unit with a detachable, wireless Android-based control panel. The seven-inch color touch screen offers a full Web browser and a selection of HP Web apps, including an airline app that will print your boarding pass in four clicks.

At the HP Imaging and Printing Group Innovation Summit in New York Monday, HP showed how the eStation’s panel can surf the Web without a PC and can download and print out online documents. Like other printers announced this year, the Photosmart eStation supports HP’s ePrint feature, which allows you to e-mail print jobs to the printer from any Web-connected device.

The control panel is similar in size and shape to many of the new Android-based tablets like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, but even though it’s based on the Android 2.1 operating system, it’s not configured to act an independent tablet. 

While it does have a solid Web browser, supports multi-touch image resizing and rotates the image from portrait to landscape orientation as needed, it doesn’t have a memory card slot and it doesn’t have access to the apps in Android Market. It does, however, function as an ebook reader and to that end has access to the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. The control panel has a little more heft than some of the newer tablets but has a solid feel and proved very responsive.

Already installed in the control panel are apps for Facebook, Yahoo, the Snapfish online photo service and other websites. Also installed is a Delta Airlines app, the first of what HP representatives said would be a handful of links to airline ticketing systems. The app will allow users to print out their board passes in four clicks, HP said. The control panel will evolve over time and more apps may be added in the future, HP representatives said.

The eStation can send faxes over the Internet, thus negating the need for a telephone line, and supports two-sided printing. According to HP, the unit can generate up to 33 black and white pages or 32 color pages per minute, its scanner tops out at 1,200 by 2,400 dots per inch and the unit supports the 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi standards.

Video, photo and text Copyright 2010 Stadium Circle Features

Samsung Galaxy Tab Does Adobe Flash

During a press conference last week for the newly announced Samsung Galaxy Tab, Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer at Adobe, showed off how the Android-based tablet can do something Apple's iPad can't: Play videos, games, web tools and other online content created with Adobe Flash.

The Galaxy Tab comes with the Android 2.2 operating system--the same used on popular Android smartphones--and comes with support for Adobe Flash 10.1.

During the Samsung press event in New York, Lynch showed how the tablet handled the video-heavy Major League Baseball website and a couple of Harry Potter online games.

The Galaxy Tab will debut with AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon and a Wi-Fi-only version will be available later. The unit weighs well under a pound, has a 1GHz Hummingbird processor, 16GB of internal memory (expandable with memory cards), and a 7-inch screen.

Want to see more? My video of the Galaxy Tab in action is available at PC World.

Video and text Copyright 2010 Stadium Circle Features