I'm Dan Ackerman and we're down in Soho today where Acer had a big press event to talk about really the hot topic of the year that's tablets and touchscreens.
They had a handful of products and some new services to show off, key among them, Iconia.
It's a 14-inch laptop and if it looks like something's a little bit different, that's because it has two screens and they're both touchscreens.
This is more of a full laptop experience and to get that onscreen keyboard,
what you do is you don't hit a button or anything, you take both hands, 10 fingers, 2 palms, put them down right here and it knows to pop up the full keyboard right there which then you can type on depending on your proficiency with onscreen keyboards.
It will also take one-hand input.
You put all five fingers down and it brings down this media jog wheel that lets you jog through all sorts of different media options and, of course, they actually have their own custom web browser built in right here that's meant to work with both screens.
I've got it up right here but with one touch, I can expand it to both screens
or I can just view it just on the top.
The Iconia is a full-featured laptop.
It's got an Intel Core i5 processor and it runs Windows 7 and it should be available, depending on where you live in the world, either in December or early in 2011.
So we're here with Acer's just-announced 10-inch Android tablet.
Unlike a lot of other Android tablets that we've seen, this one's actually gonna use Nvidia's Tegra platform and that should give you a pretty good experience in terms of, you know, media viewing and videos and music and stuff like that.
It's designed to work with Clear.fi.
That is Acer's new multimedia sharing platform and it should be out some time in 2011.
It does not yet have a name, a price, or any info on which cell carriers are going to sell it in the US.
Acer also talked about a couple of new services.
One is Clear.fi, that's their media sharing platform for having a central hub in your home and sharing music and movies and video among different devices.
The other is Alive, that is Acer's new content store and that works again on Acer products and it's a little bit like iTunes in that it has movies and music but it also has e-books and other kinds of publications and apps and even games and what it does it keeps track of your preferences and let's you set up almost channels, if you like a particular artist or type of music or movie, you can set up a channel and it will give you suggestions based on things that would fit in that channel like superhero movies or Lady Gaga.
They're just in time for the holiday shopping season to kick off.
Acer's giving us a whole bunch of stuff to think about for next year.
In Soho, I'm Dan Ackerman.
