Gadgetory

I'm Dan Ackerman we are here taking a look at the Acer Aspire r7 an experimental laptop if I've ever seen one this is the flagship of a sirs new lineup of systems and it does a lot of things that most laptops frankly don't do the first thing you're gonna see is that the touchpad is above the keyboard instead of below the keyboard that's kind of a big break from tradition you know there might be reasons for it frankly never quite got used to it I think a lot of people will actually be turned off by that maybe if you use the keyboard a lot on the touch screen and you don't use a touchpad that much I suppose it might be easier but I found myself just reaching over and constantly you know tiring my arm out trying to reach the touchpad but that's the probably the least weird thing about the r7 the laptop screen is actually on kind of a floating hinge so you can tilt it up like this and then bring it forward so it can sit right here behind the keyboard like this it can face straight up if you like you can really reach a bunch of different angles kind of like a mini desktop all-in-one and then you can actually take the screen and if we flip the entire thing around you can flip it around backwards like this and show somebody who's behind you what you're working on and that's actually one of the more useful things about this system I always like laptops and there are a handful of them that can take the screen and project it out backwards so I think that's pretty cool now Acer also says you can fold the entire thing down and use it like a tablet and here it is a 15 inch tablet not something that you see that often but I like bigger tablets but here's the other weird thing the tablet mode doesn't actually lie down completely flat because the curved hinge you can see right here it's actually got a little bit of a gap here and that holds the screen up at an angle now when you're sitting with us on your lap that angle is actually pretty handy for typing makes it a little bit more ergonomic but you can't really carry it around like a tablet because it's it's more of a triangle shape it's just kind of sticking out like that and frankly it just looks like a design mistake if you combine this with the touch pad being above the keyboard those are two weird things that just frankly look like they were ideas that Rou maybe not as well thought out as they should have been now the the part here is this is a very experimental system it's actually got decent components and a full 1920 by 1080 display and eight only once 999 for that and for a 15-inch nice touchscreen laptop maybe one with a flexi screen like this 999 that actually seems very reasonable now that being said I think a lot of these experiments sort of missed more than they hit so this may not be a practical system for too many people but I have to definitely applaud they are taking some risks and playing around with the traditional laptop shape I'm Dan Ackerman and that is the Acer Aspire r7