Acer Iconia dual-screen tablet is actually a laptop

Acer has uncoiled the Iconia, a dual-screen contraption that looks like a laptop made out of two tablets, for the whopping price of about two and a half tablets.

The Iconia looks like a laptop, but is in fact two 14-inch capacitive touchscreens bolted together in the familiar clamshell format. Either screen can be the virtual keyboard.

The Iconia has its roots in the Microsoft Courier UX, a tablet concept developed by the boys and girls at Redmond last year. The software giant has stuffed Windows 7 Home Premium into Acer's hardware to create the Iconia, with a multi-touch gesture-based user interface called the Acer Ring slapped on top. You can program this with your own gestures to launch files or applications, and capture any part of the screen by drawing a box around your selection with your finger.

The chimeric computer packs an Intel Core i5-480 processor, 4GB of RAM and 640GB of on-board storage. There's two standard USB connections and a USB 3 slot, as well as an HDMI socket. The tablet connects to the Web via 802.11n Wi-Fi.

Oddly, Acer has given the Iconia a somewhat less-than-iconic four-cell battery. That gives it a battery life of around three hours, meaning this is a desktop device rather than a mobile tablet to compete with the Apple iPad and its Android ilk. Right, so it is a laptop then, just a very odd one.

We're not sure what it is with manufacturers deciding dual-screen tablets have to be massive -- in the US, the similar 14-inch Kno dual-screen tablet is targeted at students.

The Iconia will launch on January 16 and cost £1,500. A grand and a half for a three-hour battery life? They're havin' a giraffe, surely. Share your thoughts in the comments.