The touch screen revolution - The lappy strikes back
by
, 29-12-2010 at 06:40 PM (12297 Views)
And who has not heard of the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad... The similarity is they all have touch capabilities. And over the holidays, in France I figured I could join that bandwagon with a new tablet. The peculiar aspect is that my tablet has a proper core 2 celeron (I'll get to that weirdness in a sec) and a full keyboard with HDMI out, VGA, the standard 3 USB ports, LAN, n wifi, bluteooth, 8 hours battery life, 3GB DDR3 Ram and etc. The difference being that you would expect to find that on a laptop - and you sort of do. The difference here is that Acer has yet again decided that it was going to take its Aspire and Timeline series and stick it against a market of atoms and single core ARM chips... And in theory it doesn't work - even when you throw in a multitouch capactive screen. The small fact is its a laptop with a rotateable screen - that youcan prod instead of leave alone finger-print proof.
It took me a year and a half before I was solds on the idea, and I have taken the plunge. The bottom line here is its amazing - no more hitting keys or scrolling the mouse around a screen on a trackpad. In short windows 7 might not be built for touch but the sher awesomness of the hardware overwhelms it all. The only two blunders acer made here (of the three total) are that they put in an accelerometer. Its well callibrated, but every time it changes the resolution the screen goes black for 3 seconds and comes back with all your windows resized and re-moved where you didnt want them. And the glossy screen - yes the ipad has it but seriously. Turn this thing off and outside on a nice day you have a mirror. Literally. Although if there isnt enough sun you can use the webcam anyway.
Aside from that I have no idea why (the SU2300 model) is a celeron chip. It has e-speedstep. Basically speedstep that works - 9% as well as well as ful speedstep and its based on the Penryn architecture. Now for those that don't know what that is its the architecture that powers around 80% of the worlds Core 2 Duos... And this chip is around 70% the price of the SU4100. Its 'bigger' full on core 2 duo brother that has an whopping extra 100mhz and a massive 1 extra mb of L2 cache. As intel proved before at 4Ghz, 128k isnt enough, but 512 is. At 1.2ghz - does it matter?? the answer is: NO.
That aside, its thin, fast, 'quite' 'light' although I dont want to hold it for 4 hours, even less its 7 hours of endurance, and the hinge moves slightly, but the screen doesnt. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would give this a solid 8. Its a netbook - at a high end netbook price with ULV specs (sorry no graphics though, heat and power), and in simple terms: you need 2 iPads to rival this thing's speed. And yes, it IS compatible with FLAT surfaces. (I AM looking at you'r curved underside that makes you impossible to practically impossible to use on any functional table iPad...).
If you have any extra questions or whatever, feel free to post. I rushed this a bit since I want to poke some buttons some more on my 11.6" display...
PS: The screen is 1366x768 and 11.6 inches. This makes it IMPOSSIBLE to touch stuff accurately. Simply - I figured a way around that: turn the DPI in windows setting up to 125%. Perfect.
PPS: Oh and I am talking about the ACER 1425P-2332G32nkk (ignore the stuff after the - its acers way of saying: try reading that out to customer support over the phone. Ha you cant. Bye.)
PPPS: And I think thats it... Maybe
Edit: Thanks for the reminder there will.
Here we go: http://www.amazon.fr/Acer-1425P-233G...3746672&sr=8-1 is where I got mine since reviews and articles are hard to come by (its in french) the translation can be found here: http://translate.google.com/translat...%3D8-1&act=url
I will try and post the snaps once dropbox gets working again... Every time I try to get public links i get a time out and a 404