Unpacking the Acer Aspire 1420P PDC Edition

As I wrote a few hours ago, every PDC attendee got himself a nice little Acer Aspire 1420P laptop (by the way, kudos to the conference organizers – I went to pick up the laptop during the 30-minute break at 12:30PM, and the queue was very long but also very quick – in less than 10 minutes I was holding the laptop in my hands). This laptop comes preinstalled with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit edition, Office 2010 Beta, Windows Live Essentials and Virtual PC (XP Mode) for Windows 7, and the Windows 7 Touch Pack which is a bundle of really neat applications demonstrating multitouch capabilities.

The machine itself sports a rather weak Intel Celeron U2300 CPU, running two cores at 1.2GHz, 2GB of DDR3 1066MHz RAM (upgradeable to 8GB), a 250GB HD, a multitouch tablet display with two touch points, HDMI and VGA output, WWAN support, an accelerometer sensor for automatic display re-orientation, and a few other perks.

It scores only 3.2 on the Windows Experience Index, due to the comparatively weak graphics adapter. The CPU scores a 3.9, memory 4.7, and the hard disk scores a surprising 5.6.

The 11.6” screen looks very crisp and bright with the native resolution of 1366x768. The touch display is not amazing but it’s somewhat more pleasant to use than the N-Trig display I have on my multitouch laptop. The digitizer, on the other hand, is fairly primitive and doesn’t have any buttons (such as an eraser function) that are pretty common on other tablets.

Tomorrow I’m going to try using it exclusively during the day, without resorting to my well-tested friend, the Dell Latitude XT. I’ll let you know if its battery is going to be up to this task. (Apparently it should last 8 hours on the Power Saver plan. Wow.)

If you’re looking for a slightly larger multitouch companion and are at the PDC 2009, go ahead and hurry to the Sela Group booth at the Partner Expo area. There’s a 25.5” HP Touchsmart all-in-one PC with multitouch support that will be drawn tomorrow from a pool of all attendees that come to swipe their badge at the booth. You can also take a look at our book (in print), hear about the XP to Windows 7 reference application, ask around about Silverlight 4 innovation, and let us know what you think.

If you missed the PDC but are going to be in Israel in December, stay tuned for the Sela Developer Practice (SDP) where we are going to repeat many of the PDC talks (often in more depth) for the Israeli developer community.