Touch interfaces are all-but mainstream in the handheld market, but touchscreen notebooks are still few and far between, especially outside of the netbook-market. Now Acer is looking to remedy this with the launch of the new Aspire 5745PG.
The 15.6in LED-backlit screen features a 1,366x768px resolution and full multitouch-support. To make interacting with your fingers a little easier, the manufacturer has also included its own interface, dubbed TouchPortal, to bring all of your media together in one easy to access place.
Powering the laptops are a choice of the latest dual- and quad-core Intel mobile CPUs from the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 families. These will be paired with either a 1GB GeForce GT 330M or a 512MB GeForce 310M graphics-core and 4GB DDR3 as standard. Unfortunately, there's no sign of any of NVIDIA's newly announced Fermi-based GPUs here, but you will get switchable graphics on models with compatible processors.
The rest of the specs are fairly standard for a media-based notebook, with mechanical hard-drives of up to 640GB, Blu-ray drives, 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 3.0 all on offer. The six-cell battery should last up to three and a half hours on laptops with switchable graphics, or around three hours on the models without, which sounds about right for a laptop of this class.
Fully loaded, the laptop will measure a maximum of 36mm thick and tip the scales at around 2.75kg.
The Aspire 5745PG is available now starting at a very attractive £699.99 including VAT, though it can be found for slightly less at some retailers.
