Gadgetory

well this is David with the Virgin this is the Acer Aspire r7 it's a laptop kind of it's also a desktop kind of it's also even a tablet kind of mostly it's a laptop it's an incredibly well made sturdy premium feeling gray laptop with all the ports and trappings you'd expect it is very thick and very heavy more than five pounds in over an inch thick so it's really not a tablet at all it's 15.6 inch 1080p touchscreen display is also much more firmly in laptop territory it looks great by the way big and accurate and sharp any way you look at it there's also six gigs of RAM inside plus Intel's integrated graphics a Core i5 processor and a hybrid hard drive with 520 gigs of total storage so alright fine it's a laptop except the r7 has a hinge which Acer calls easel that's easy e/l for some reason which turns it from a laptop into a whole bunch of other things it's kind of like the Lenovo yoga with 4 modes notebook mode which is basically just a laptop easel mode which has the screen floating on top of the keyboard much closer to your face display mode with it turn around facing away from the keyboard and pad mode where it's basically just a slightly angled tablet those are the four technical modes but the one I used most was at Acer called the Starship Enterprise basically you have the screen over top of the base parallel to it it's like having a drawer for your keyboard and it's also awesome for a standing desk Acer is really big on the touch screen here and the company is pretty explicitly demoting the trackpad so much so that it's actually moved the trackpad above the keyboard so it floats sort of awkwardly between the keys and the hinge it looks really weird at first though other than the horribly misplaced Intel sticker I did get used to it fairly quickly actually using the thing was a whole other story though not having a palm nest for the keyboard is just awkward and uncomfortable I almost wish Acer had just ditched it entirely and forced me to use the touchscreen other than all that this is pretty much your average laptop there's some bloatware but not too much and performance is good without being particularly spectacular as long as you don't try to play games using the integrated graphics the speakers are surprisingly good which along with the screen makes the r7 a pretty solid media machine it's almost like a super portable all-in-one in a sense you don't want to carry it around too much but it'll work great on a desk or a kitchen table but it all comes back to the design Acer's betting that you're willing to either always use the touchscreen or always use an external mouse the r7 is otherwise a pretty great machine and star $999 it's even priced pretty well but windows 8 isn't touch friendly enough to ditch a mask completely and who wants to always use an external Mouse Acer said that it's looking at bringing the cool easel hinge to other devices and I hope one of them is a normal laptop I like what a star's trying to do here but I don't really like using the aspire r7 maybe we're just not ready for it yet