Acer Aspire Z5600

Touchscreen PCs always felt awkward when they were underpinned by Windows Vista, but now that Windows 7 has arrived, we've begun to see these devices come into their own. First out of the blocks was the Sony VAIO VPC-L11S1E, which wowed us with one of the best screens we'd ever seen, and now Acer has unveiled its own premium touchscreen model: the Aspire Z5600.

While Sony's touchscreen effort was a graduate of the minimalist school of design, the Acer is a little more eye-catching. Two chrome struts support the weight of the 23in screen, and liberally scattered around the Aspire's glossy bulk are strips of deep-maroon plastic. That doesn't look as bad as it could, though, and although the Z5600 is unlikely to appeal to everyone, we'd have no reservations about letting it take centre stage in our living room.

The 23in display takes pride of place and boasts a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 - higher than the 1,920 x 1,080 offered by the Sony. It boasts optical touchscreen technology as the Sony does, and this means the screen control feels highly responsive and accurate. It offers two-finger multitouch control, which allows you to zoom, scroll and rotate images in applications that support it. And the panel itself is bright, boasting realistic colours with no sign of backlight bleed. It may not be able to match the quality of the double-backlit Sony, but it isn't far off and is certainly perfectly capable of doing justice to any media you care to throw at it.

Beyond the scrolling and panning support built into Windows 7, the bulk of the Z5600's touchscreen-specific features are wrapped up in Acer's TouchPortal interface, which hides Windows 7's familiar desktop beneath an attractive wood-effect tabletop scattered with icons. Featured applications include Windows' own Touch Pack tools - Lagoon, Globe and Collage - and Acer has bolstered this collection with some of its own applications. These include an image-sharing tool for Facebook and Flickr, a handful of games, plus basic note-taking and drawing tools, the likes of which we've seen before on HP's TouchSmart systems.