Acer Iconia 6120 Review: A Good Implementation of a Terrible Idea

At a Coup d'oeil

Expert's Military rating

Pros

Threefold multitouch screens offer unequalled capabilities
Stylish purpose

Cons

Uses last-gen Intel processor
Poor battery life
Soft keyboard slows typing

Our Finding of fact

Though Genus Acer did a proper job with the touch features, replacing the turn down pack of cards with a touch screen is a poor trade-murder.

The Acer Iconia 6120 laptop is one of those marquee, "halo" products meant to draw care to the brand as very much like to satisfy everyday computer science needs. In many slipway it's a jolly ordinary 14-inch laptop. The standout feature, however, is its second 14-inch multitouch screen, which replaces the integral lower keyboard-and-touchpad deck. As senior high-concept products go, the Iconia is fairly affordable at $1199 (as of May 2, 2020). Still, at that price it isn't a very spate, and you're better off choosing something a little more down to earth. Acer's twofold-touch implementation of a Windows laptop computer is about A good as you could expect it to be, but it's just non a great idea in the first stead.

You don't really get a whole lot of computing power for your $1199. The system ships with a 2.66GHz Meat i5-480M; that processor isn't slow, but it is part of the previous generation of Intel Core CPUs. Acer would start better functioning and battery life from one of the newer Sandy Bridge models. The Iconia also relies on Intel's integrated graphics, which is thin for everyday desktop productiveness stuff, but a poor selection for malodourous-def telecasting playback or 3D gaming. Here, again, the newer propagation of Intel processors would assist a lot. The Iconia comes standard with 4GB of fairly slow RAM, and the 640GB Winchester drive is a pokier 5400-revolutions per minute model as an alternative of a snappier 7200-rpm driveway. In our tests all of that added equal to a ho-hum WorldBench 6 score of 109. Everything is responsive enough when you're meet checking email, browsing the Web, or writing documents. Button the system with more-intensive tasks, though, and it becomes dull.

To fit the second screen, Acer distinctly had to quit about of the measure features we expect on laptops of this size. You get over HDMI and VGA ports for TV production, a pair of USB 2.0 ports along the left-handed, a USB 3.0 port wine on the right, phone and microphone jacks, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and gigabit ethernet. What's missing? Most laptops of this size and weight also have a multiformat card reader, Bluetooth, an optical push on, and a combination USB/eSATA port, none of which appear on the Iconia. Genus Acer is obviously banking on the desirability of its dual touch-screen design to make rising for the shortcomings.

Since the integral bottom deck–where the keyboard, touchpad, and other miscellaneous buttons usually reside–has been replaced by a multitouch capacitive touchscreen, you do all typing happening a soft keyboard. It whole kit better than I expected, but I still recovered myself typing more slowly and qualification more errors than I would on a good strong-arm keyboard. The keyboard's size makes using IT a slim easier than typing happening an iPad or a similar tablet, but that's faint praise. The touchpad area beneath the keyboard is oddly minute, and lacks support for the standard gestures we've refer expect, such as two-feel scrolling. That's a bitty mind-boggling, as it's all just software and Acer could easily have addressed those issues.

Touch all five fingers to the lower screen, and you'll get up a special hub that lets you draw gestures, quickly choice from some features, or launch one of Acer's touch-enabled applications. The touch Browser spans some screens, but won't make you switch from Chromium-plate or Firefox. The SocialJogger app shows your Facebook, Chitter, and YouTube feeds; it works as advertised and feels like a slightly laggy tab application, but you really have no demand to use it when you have a air-filled Windows laptop computer at your disposal. The same goes for the touch-based music and exposure apps. Yes, they all work as described, merely they're with great care…superfluous. Navigating these programs on a lower-deck touch screen doesn't save you significant time or effort. Most of them would work just too on the top touchscreen, and none of them are huge timesavers compared with the plethora of standard keyboard-and-mouse software out there.

If the Acer Iconia has one main problem, it's that the lower touch screen comes with a whole lot of baggage. It makes the scheme thick, for starters. At 1.4 inches thick, the Iconia isn't huge, but it is considerably thicker than laptops with similar glasses and no ocular drive. Information technology's pretty heavy at 6 pounds, besides. I already mentioned the missing card reader and Bluetooth. And driving two large LCDs puts a strain on the battery, which lasted a trifling 2 hours, 11 minutes in our tests. All so that you commode have a mediocre soft keyboard and some touch apps that don't yield up place on the upper screen?

Acer would have been much better murder equipping the Iconia with a standard personal keyboard and replacing only the touchpad with a passabl last-resolution 4-inch touchscreen. It's good to hear Genus Acer trying some rough designs, especially ones as aesthetically pleasing as the Iconia's, but as a applicable matter it just doesn't add up to replace the third deck of a Windows laptop with a touchscreen.