"Infomercial hands." It's a phrase my wife and I use to describe the pose and expression that shows up in the beginning of most infomercials—the ones that start with phrases like, "Are you tired of not being able to pour your soda like a normal human being?" It's always accompanied by footage of people throwing up their hands in disgust after failing to accomplish tasks that most of us can do without any problems.

The Acer Aspire R7 gives me infomercial hands. Constantly.

I get that PC OEMs are facing decreasing margins as non-traditional computing devices continue to gain popularity, and I get that there's shareholder pressure to think of the next big thing in the portable space in order to keep revenue up and hit the quarterly guidance. But the Aspire R7 is unfortunately not the next big thing. I'm not entirely sure what it is, really, or what its target market is, or what particular task or tasks it's supposed to excel at that other devices don't already do better.

What hath Acer wrought?

Specs at a glance: Acer Aspire R7 Screen 1920×1080 15.6-inch 10-touchpoint IPS, 141 PPI OS Windows 8 CPU 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-3427U (Turbo Boost 2.8GHz) RAM 6GB DDR3 (upgradeable to 12GB) GPU Intel HD 4000 (integrated) Storage 500GB 5400 rpm HDD + 24 GB SSD (caching) Networking Broadcom 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports 1x proprietary Acer Converter Port, 1x HDMI, 2x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, 1x eSATA/USB 2.0 combo, stereo headphone/line out/mic combo, Kensington lock port, SDXC card slot Battery 4-cell 3560mAh Li-ion Size 0.81 (at front)/1.12 (at rear) x 14.83 x 10.02 inches, 20.5 mm (at front)/28.4 mm (at rear) x 376.7 mm x 254.5 mm Weight 5.29 lb/2.4 kg Starting price $999 Price as configured $999

We got some hands-on time with the Acer Aspire R7 back in early May, when Ars Senior Products Specialist Andrew Cunningham called it "the strangest convertible PC we've ever seen." Having spent a couple of weeks with the device, I can definitely validate that. In the hours I've spent using it, I never grew wholly comfortable with its layout and function, and I came to resent its weight and overall unfriendliness.

The Aspire R7 is a convertible, that bastard product category that became popular with OEMs after the launch of Windows 8. It features a large 15.6" touchscreen mounted on a double-jointed hinge, called the "Ezel Hinge" by Acer's marketers. The Ezel hinges at both ends, allowing the screen to be raised, lowered, and pivoted. The R7 uses its big hinge to convert between a traditional laptop-like appearance, a keyboard-enhanced tablet-like appearance, a supported tablet, and a full hand-held tablet.

The fact that the device has certain set "modes" into which you are supposed to transform it isn't immediately obvious at first, and so Acer has spent quite a bit of time ensuring that customers understand how the R7 works. Its website contains numerous animations showing the R7 merrily flipping back and forth; the device also came with a pack-in piece of paper graphically explaining its different configurations. New users can even click on a video on the different modes embedded in the Task Bar for reference.

Setting aside the hinge and its implications for a moment, the R7 is certainly not awful hardware. It has a dual-core 1.8GHz Ivy Bridge Core i5-3427U, a low-voltage 22nm CPU with hyperthreading, and a max rated TDP of 17 watts. It has 4GB of soldered-in RAM, and the configuration we reviewed came with its one RAM slot filled with a 2GB SODIMM, yielding an odd-but-not-bad total of 6GB. Its integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU is perfectly adequate for non-hardcore-gamer usage. We would have liked to see the new Haswell CPUs make an appearance, but Ivy Bridge isn't a bad performer.

The laptop/convertible/whatever-we're-calling-these-things defines solidity; it's 5.29 lbs of aluminum, plastic, and glass. The Ezel Hinge and its captive touchscreen lack even a tiny bit of flop or play—the screen moves with balanced authority on the hinge and the hinge in turn pivots against the laptop base with squeak-free smoothness. The screen stayed exactly at whatever angle I positioned it without shifting up or down. In fact, at times it took perhaps too much effort to move the screen, and I'd end up shifting the entire laptop around on its little rubber feet. However, I'd much rather have a hinged display like this sprung on the stiff side than on the loose side.

The display itself is big and bright. The IPS panel supports pretty broad viewing angles, which is important because the R7's shape-changing design means that the screen is likely to be viewed from a wide variety of distances and positions. The LED backlighting was even and without any obvious hot spots or bleeding. Its 10-point capacitive touch layer also gave me no problems—it responded to touches and drags immediately with no noticeable lag.

Unexpectedly, I like the keyboard. I find myself hating most island-style keyboards, but this one's quite nice. The keys take a tiny amount of effort to depress and then instantly descend their full short length to bottom out authoritatively. There's no sense of mush, thank goodness. And the backlight, though it bleeds out from under the keys, is extremely bright at its max setting.

There are also some fair-sized (for a portable) speakers on the bottom of the device—a pair of 2W "Dolby Home Theater" branded grilles. The audio coming out of them sounded quite clear at low-to-medium volume. I'm not sure that slapping a "Dolby Home Theater" brand on them means you'd want to use them to listen to a movie at full volume, but for casual listening to streamed audio, they were perfectly fine.

That is unfortunately the end of the positive things I have to say about this device. In daily use it performed adequately, but it definitely isn't going to win any awards for speed. I didn't bother running any structured benchmarks because Ivy Bridge is a thoroughly known quantity at this point; all of its hardware is already well-documented. (You can check our Asus ZenBook Prime and 2013 MacBook Air reviews for hard numbers if you want them.)

The lack of an SSD for its primary operating system didn't make as big of an impact as I thought it would—at least, not at first. The R7 comes with a 500GB 5400 rpm hard disk drive, but it's augmented with a 24GB mSATA SSD that functions as a cache for the operating system boot files and for frequently accessed applications. Subjectively, it was slower than using an SSD but much faster than using just the hard disk drive—which I got to learn a lot about.

But, first, let's talk about the R7's flippy screen and hinge. The issue with the R7 is that although it has four primary "forms," it's not particularly useful in any of them—sort of like how Astrotrain wasn't a very good space shuttle, train, or robot.

Listing image by Lee Hutchinson