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Acer’s most interesting announcements this week were its repairable laptop and the DualPlay Mini concept. They\u00a0were two very different reveals for IFA: one\u00a0a more sustainable approach\u00a0to the laptop upgrade cycle, the other a dreamy\/mad\u00a0hybrid of a handheld gaming PC and mini-laptop, using\u00a0the same eight-inch display.<\/p>\n
The premise of Acer’s Project\u00a0DualPlay Mini\u00a0concept\u00a0is the ability to “move fluidly between gaming and productivity” according to the company, but let’s be honest, this is a gaming machine. No one is going to be exclusively tackling spreadsheets on this thing \u2014 although it supports external displays.<\/p>\n
While an eight-inch screen is fine for handheld gaming, it’s a… challenging way to navigate Windows 11 in a more conventional way. That’s probably the biggest reason why this won’t ever hit stores. The two prototypes at Acer’s stand seemed to share the same game accounts, so attendees could only play one at a time. That’s a logistics issue, but it curtailed my time playing on the prototype. Honestly, I was more enamored with the flip-and-swivel mechanism, where you’d pull the display up, rotate it on the horizontal axis and click it into place. It was so, so\u00a0satisfying<\/em>.<\/p>\n