Acer Project DualPlay Mini concept hands-on: Flipping from powerful handheld to powerful tiny laptop

It’s thick, it’s heavy but I couldn't stop flipping and swivelling it.

Mat Smith for Engadget

Acer's most interesting announcements this week were its repairable laptop and the DualPlay Mini concept. They were two very different reveals for IFA: one a more sustainable approach to the laptop upgrade cycle, the other a dreamy/mad hybrid of a handheld gaming PC and mini-laptop, using the same eight-inch display.

The premise of Acer's Project DualPlay Mini concept is 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 — although it supports external displays.

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 satisfying.

The controller design is very Xbox, with the same metallic D-pad circle and Xbox thumbsticks now immortalized in IKEA furniture. It's comfortable enough for a quick spin around in Forza (I particularly liked the spongy collar buttons), but I soon noticed the weight of the DualPlay Mini (in what world is this mini), which makes sense given that whatever is powering the thing comes with dual-fan cooling, as we've seen in Acer's gaming handhelds that have made it to market.

Mat Smith for Engadget

Another drawback, arguably, is the lack of any kind of trackpad. Acer's own promo video shows users controlling the device with a mouse in its laptop configuration. But where do I expect Acer to put the darn thing? Despite all that, I'm not completely put off. It might be the slick transformation mechanism, unlatching and spinning around between game console and laptop. It might be how it reminded me of my Kohjinsha mini laptop from the 2010s.

An Acer spokesperson who helped get the DualPlay Mini running Forza Horizon 5 reiterated several times that he couldn't tell me much about it, aside from the fact that it was running on a GPU already available on the market, which made the whole thing even more mysterious. Even if this never gets into our hands, I'd love to see this display-flipping mechanism in something. Anything.