Whether you agree tablets will replace laptops or not the idea does seem to be slowly gaining traction, this time with Acer announcing Iconia, a tablet with two 14-inch touch screens in a laptop-like clam shell form.
The two multi-touch screens are ultra-thin, scratch and fingerprint resistant LED backlit LCDs made from a durable glass material, and featuring a resolution of 1366×768, and support for up to 10 fingers touch control at once.
They act as a dual-screen set up so a window can be maximized over both screens or each screen can be used for its own tasks. For example, the bottom screen can be used for a media file browser and the top screen for viewing videos.
Perhaps most importantly for those who might consider this as a laptop replacement Acer Iconia comes with a QWERTY Virtual Keyboard that activates when both palms are placed on the bottom display. It includes a virtual touchpad, a numeric keypad, predictive text input, and support for international keyboard layouts. The intent was to make the virtual keyboard good enough to replace a physical keyboard of traditional laptops.
Acer also emphasized software applications tailored to multi-touch capabilities. The special software is launched by putting five fingers on the display and making a grabbing gesture, which Acer calls an "Acer Ring". This gives a choice of applications including a Gesture Editor which allows assigning user defined gestures to specific tasks, a Window Manager, a Device Control Console, and a Virtual Keyboard.
Acer Iconia also comes with Acer's existing applications from their other touch screen devices including TouchBrowser, TouchPhoto, TouchMusic and TouchVideo, and three new ones including SocialJogger for checking Facebook, YouTube and Flickr in one place, My Journal for collecting web clippings of interesting stuff, and Scrapbook for storing clippings, notes, screen shots and so on.
Its Intel Core i5 CPU reminds more of a laptop than a tablet, but Acer didn't provide any information about memory and storage capacity. They did boast about an HDMI for connecting to an HDTV, and possible 3G connectivity.
Iconia should be available in December or early 2011, but the pricing is still unknown.
Here is a video preview:
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