Software

Windows 7 was not designed for touch, and navigating it by finger can be frustrating. Unlike Samsung, Acer didn't go for a full interface overlay; instead it includes several touch-friendly apps in a suite of software called Acer Ring—much like what you'd find on , its , and its . Here, you pull up the ring by tapping five fingers on the screen. The apps then pop up around a central ring of shortcuts and utilities, and you can select your destination from there.

The central ring includes a link to Acer games, a calculator, a camera app, the Windows snipping tool, a disk-cleaning utility (useful on the tiny 32GB SSD), and a syncing tool.

Relatively full-featured apps in the ring include Touch Browser, Social Jogger, My Journal, and Clear.fi media player. Touch Browser is exactly what you'd expect--a touch-friendly browser that runs at full screen with large controls. Social Jogger is a three-paneled app with update streams from Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. My Journal collects clippings of Web pages taken from the Touch Browser, and lets you scribble on them with a finger or a capacitive stylus.

The Clear.fi app, as on Acer's Android tablets, facilitates playing photos, music, and videos from shared or local libraries across a DLNA network. It also supports streaming video from YouTube or Facebook. Regrettably, none of the several YouTube videos I tried would play; instead, I got an error message saying that Clear.fi could not play the selected video.