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Acer bridges gap between laptops, tablet PCs with dual touch-screen Iconia-6120

We've known about Acer's Iconia portable device for a while now, but the company has finally announced specs, pricing, and availability for the dual touch-screen tablet. Known officially as the Iconia-6120 Dual-Screen Touchbook, it combines a pair of 14-inch LED-backlit LCD screens and layers a unique interface over Windows 7.
Written by Sean Portnoy, Contributor

We've known about Acer's Iconia portable device for a while now, but the company has finally announced specs, pricing, and availability for the dual touch-screen tablet. Known officially as the Iconia-6120 Dual-Screen Touchbook, it combines a pair of 14-inch LED-backlit LCD screens and layers a unique interface over Windows 7.

Gallery: Acer's dual-screen tablet/laptop

While Acer refers to the Iconia as a tablet, its specs resemble those of a more traditional laptop, including an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 640GB hard drive. With its 14-inch displays, it also weighs nearly six pounds, so it's far bulkier than any tablet PC out there.

Then again, the Iconia puts that second screen to work as either a virtual keyboard, an extension of the top screen (so you can span a Web page or document across the two LCDs), or a secondary screen that displays something different than the top LCD. Acer provides what it calls a "Ring Control Interface" that gives you easy access to your applications and Web sites through touch gestures and "AppCards," which let you log into Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube simultaneously (why no Twitter?) or collect Web clippings and content that's updated whenever you open it.

Given all this, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Iconia is priced more like a laptop than a tablet, though it doesn't come with an astronomical price tag: It's available in April for $1,199.99. Is that the right price for an innovative device that could either pave the road for future laptop design or be an interesting dead end? Let us know in the Comments section.

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