Acer Aspire 5745PG review

By adding a touchscreen, Acer’s new 5745PG mid-range laptop tries to combine the versatility of a Windows laptop with the simplicity and immediacy of a tablet. The laptop chassis looks sleek with a textured lid and gunmetal grey wrist rest. Despite the additional electronics, the 15in LED-backlit screen is only slightly thicker than the display on a regular laptop. The multi-touch panel hasn’t degraded the crispness of images either. Colours were accurate and contrast was balanced; vertical viewing angles were reasonable, but horizontal angles were limited.

Touch response was fast, but accuracy wasn’t pixel perfect; closing windows often required a second attempt. The 5745PG is being sold as a laptop rather than a hybrid tablet, so the touchscreen is designed to be used alongside the traditional mouse and keyboard, but we would still expect better accuracy than this. The keyboard itself was comfortable to use, with well-spaced Chiclet keys that showed very little flex when typing. A good-sized trackpad provides a more traditional alternative to the touchscreen.

Multi-touch interfaces can be intuitive and help increase productivity when used with well-designed software. Unfortunately, most developers have been slow to implement touchscreen support into their software. For example, using the touchscreen simply for Windows navigation quickly became frustrating because of small user interface elements.

Text entry was initially frustrating using the onscreen keyboard. It doesn’t start automatically when clicking in text boxes and obscures the windows below it. Despite this, we could enter text with reasonable speed and accuracy after organising our windows into a split view. However, with a traditional keyboard directly beneath the screen it’s both counter-intuitive and uncomfortable to enter text this way; so you end up switching back forth from screen to keyboard as you work.

The bundled Microsoft Surface programs make the most of the touchscreen. Globe, a 3D version of Bing maps, is an excellent example of how desktop applications can be optimised for touch input. Pinch gestures can rotate and zoom in-and-out at any point in the world, although its usefulness is limited because you can’t search for directions. The Acer touch-enabled multimedia programs were basic and the small control interface wasn’t especially touch-friendly either. There likely isn’t enough extra functionality to entice users away from their media players of choice.

Touchscreen aside, the 5745PG is a well-balanced mid-range laptop. A Core i3-350m processor and 4GB of memory provide decent performance in everyday applications. The nVidia 310m graphics chip will play 1080p video, although a meagre 15.7fps in Call of Duty means it’s not suited to playing modern games.

Mobile devices have made touchscreen technology increasingly popular, so it makes sense for laptop manufacturers to experiment with multi-touch support. Unfortunately, Windows needs a great deal of refinement to make touchscreens anything more than a novelty feature. The added touchscreen hasn’t raised the price of the 5745PG dramatically, making it reasonable value even with this added technology. Whether the touchscreen will be of any use is personal preference, but until software improves we’d recommend avoiding such displays for the foreseeable future.