When Bill Gates was hatching the plan to take over all our computers with a single operating system, he perhaps had thought Windows will go places tagging along with the PC; hopping out of the desk; climbing on to our laps; sitting plump in our palms; and eventually morphing into an all-in-one carry-along contraption. Steve Ballmer set the ball rolling towards that direction by launching the 2-in-1 detachable Surface in 2012. Since then, a streak of innovation took off around it and Acer's Switch Alpha 12 is perhaps the most affordable evidence of the niche Microsoft carved with the Surface line-up of devices. The Acer Switch Alpha 12 in its barebones form looks like an oversized tablet. Too big to hold it up and browse and too heavy to carry around in the street. Wrenching the kickstand open though, I found a giant vision board in front of me. I could Scribble on it with the attached stylus, dab on it with my fat fingers, or just double it up as a second screen to watch a cricket match live while I'm at my desk working the hard day's night. And flexing the kickstand all the way up, I could type out stories when I was lucky enough to grab a seat in the Delhi Metro.
It was also a delight to look at the screen, right from the moment the loading screen gives away to the lock-screen where Bing welcomed me with a new breath-taking image every day, to binging on Netflix to life on these days of financial emergency where getting out of the house is near about impossible for someone who has to depend on public transport to get around. There is a good thick bezel around the screen though, that may hamper the viewing experience somewhat but actually it helps when holding the screen with the hands. The 12-inch real estate has been blessed with an IPS LCD panel with a viewing angle wide enough to get a clear picture sitting way off the screen. It is also packed with a brilliantly lit quad HD resolution with a rather glossy surface which could give away my fingerprints to even the laziest of those CID guys. But it's too inviting to touch. Unlike most of these big-screen devices which literally prohibits finger movement with a sticky rough surface, the Switch Alpha 12 is butter smooth on that front. Be it my fingers or the stylus, I didn't face any friction at all.
Calling this screen bright would be an understatement
And Acer has been kind enough to include a physical start button on the left side of the screen. And a tactile volume rocker. But the power button on top of the side is extremely annoying. More often than not, my fingers accidentally brushed against the power button and the Switch Alpha 12 simply called it quits and decided to go sleep. And it took a long 3-4 seconds to wake the thing back up.
The brushed metal back-plate makes this 12-inch tablet a charm to hold and operate; especially in the kitchen switching playlists or in the bed binging Netflix. What makes this hybrid contraption even more fluid is the kickstand with a hard rubber anti-slip coating along the middle part. Despite my fears of accidentally dropping it from the window sill while streaming music, the kickstand never faltered under my constant finger pounding.
The kickstand is the real MVP
At 0.35-inches, it may not be as slim as the Surface Pro which the Switch Alpha 12 takes after and neither as light with 900 grams in weight. Adding the keyboard cover makes it slightly bulky for a portable detachable. But the thick and heavy form factor is a perfectly understandable choice considering the innards house a liquid cooling unit to keep the components under control. There is no fan and the end result is a device that isn’t loud like laptops which have a habit of humming, but heats up significantly when multiple operations are being executed.
A 6th Generation Intel Core processor being at the heart of the device is a considerably favourable argument for the liquid cooling loop. You have the option of choosing amongst the Intel i7, the i5 or the i3 as well as the memory. I received my review unit with an Intel Core i3 CPU clocked at 2.30GHz coupled with 4GB of RAM and 128GB SSD storage and I found the setup to be a breezy affair. Never once did the device freeze. That being said, I am not someone who’d you would describe as a power user. My usage is rather basic. Even then, it did occasionally slow down though considering the torturous number of Chrome tabs I have the habit of keeping open this was understandable. And ungodly hours of streaming episodes on Netflix made it close to billowing steam, figuratively speaking of course.
Unlike its inspiration - The Surface Pro, Acer bundles the full sized keyboard alongside the Acer Active Pen stylus with the tablet. The keyboard has a rubber coating giving a good grip to the wrists while I typed away. The track pad is placed band in the middle and often got tricked into functioning upon an unconscious brush of my fingers while I typed. The chiclet styled keys too are placed with an ample travel of 1.4mm. The keyboard connects to the mothership using a magnetic panel on the top that latches on to the magnetic bottom of the tablet. Acer also offers a more expensive back-lit keyboard.
Using the Stylus is totally like writing with a pen. It's pressure sensitive, fluid, precise and also palm resistant. Windows 10's Continuum has been perfectly leveraged to offer a seamless transition from Windows 10 Tablet Mode to the full-fledged PC version with the ubiquitous desktop.
I often mistook it to be a real pen
Windows itself is a delight to use. The new and reinvented interface has been made keeping such devices in mind and it shows. The luminous screen provides ample real estate for Windows to flourish in all its glory. Windows Ink Scribble Pad is a highlight and on my flight back home during Durga Puja, I had a co-passenger who was fine-tuning a lifelike sketch on the Windows Ink Pad albeit on a different device, of what probably seemed his friends, probably as a tribute to their friendship.
Cortana was at my beck and call at all times and just a nonchalant use of the summoning phrase made the assistant apparate out of thin air to my service. The microphone on the Switch Alpha 12 is very responsive and always listening, (right from the lock-screen if you enable it). Multi-windows, multi-desktops and apps from the Windows Store all worked without any hitch.
Although it does come with its own unique set of drawbacks. I found the icons, especially in the side menus, too small in their default zoom for my fingers to lock on to them. The menu bars though adjusted to a bigger size when I used it in tablet mode. The virtual keyboard was a bit of a pain too. I had to manually bring it up every time I had to fill a box using touch which is something that should be made intuitive. As a side-note, it is impossible to get out of Chrome's Full Screen mode if you do not have the keyboard attached. Be forewarned!
Placing the device in its laptop mode on your lap is a bit of a hassle too. You have to flick open the kickstand and support the screen upright and use the keyboard. And it gets too damn difficult to keep it still. Acer has pitched this device for users on the move, but the difficulty in keeping it static enough to type without the entire setup jittering with every knee-jerk takes points away from this offering.
Yet, I found myself using the Alpha Switch 12 in places I wouldn't normally use a large screen device. While on the Metro to work on a story on the long ride home for example, or while running through the morning headlines with my hot cup of Joe with the device upright on my desk. Texts appeared in a perfect contrast to the bright white background. It also became my companion in the kitchen where I managed to make up a little space on the side to loop music and look up the recipe. At work, it doubled up as a second screen feeding me with facts and information for the stories I am working on. On days when I needed a standalone screen to live stream a keynote event, the Switch Alpha 12 came to the rescue. And on the weekends when I refuse to get out of the bed, it stayed with me offering up Netflix episodes one after the other in life-like resolution.
And the battery on the device is reasonable as well. On average use, the Switch Alpha 12 managed to last a good 6 hours, primarily due to its fan-less design. Now this isn’t all day battery life but it is reasonably good. That being said, on variants which have the faster processors, you should expect poorer battery life. It took me an hour-hour and a half to charge it up from zero and on standby, it lasted days.
As for the connectivity, the Switch Alpha 12 covered most of the bases. It comes with a standard USB 3.0 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a separate charging jack and a USB-Type C port that also doubles up as a charging source. You can pair any USB-compatible device to work with the device. There is also a microSD card slot, and a decent rear camera for lord knows what reason. I couldn't imagine a situation when I would be holding up this giant screen to take a photo. Although the webcam on the front comes with Intel's RealSense 3D managed to capture my face with reasonable clarity.
FYI, t he headphone jack has been retained
For a price of Rs 49,999 for the whole package, complete with the keyboard and the stylus, the Acer Switch Alpha 12 is a steal. It is a Surface imitator but for half the price. And while it's true that these detachables are an acquired habit, once you get used to the feeling of having a powerful desktop-grade Windows Tablet which can be used just about anywhere, it is hard to let go. The Acer Switch Alpha 12 is like coffee made of freshly ground beans. Comes at a slight premium, but grows on you eventually turning into your go-to companion in this fast-track life. At its best, it's the all-rounder versatile vision board; at its worst, it's a bulky gimmick with the sun shining out of its ass.
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