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.

Acer has crammed the Z5600 with a surprisingly good specification too. The Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 processor returned a superb 1.47 in our application-based benchmarks - marginally quicker than the Sony, which scored 1.44 - and the plentiful 4GB of RAM is complemented by a massive 1TB hard disk. Elsewhere, you get a hybrid DVB-T/analogue TV tuner, 802.11n wireless, and a decent pair of stereo speakers. The latter pump out clear sound at good levels of volume.

If there's one area where this Acer disappoints it's in the graphics department with a weedy ATI Radeon HD 4530 offering little in the way of gaming ability - although the Sony is no better in this respect. It returned a score of just 14fps in our medium-quality Crysis benchmark, which rules out running more intensive gaming titles at high detail settings. Perhaps more surprisingly, it also struggled to run some of the touchscreen software, with demanding tools such as Microsoft Surface Globe often struggling to keep up a smooth frame rate.

Another mild irritation, especially given the superb screen, is the lack of Blu-ray, which the more expensive Sony does have. The peripherals are also of a lower quality, with a mouse that lacks special features and a keyboard that both feels lightweight and is plagued with a poor typing action.

Despite these irritations, the Acer Z5600 still offers enough quality elsewhere to offer a creditable alternative to the A-Listed Sony. Its touchscreen is responsive and looks great; it boasts a decent range of features; and it looks great to boot. And it more than comes into its own when you take into account the price. At £781 exc VAT, it's £450 cheaper than the Sony, a differential that more than makes up for its few weaknesses. If you can't afford to splash out on the extravagant VAIO, the Aspire Z5600 should be next on your list.

Price when reviewed: £782 (£899 inc VAT)