Acer touts 'beyond the norm' monster 20.1in laptop

Computex 2006 Acer demo'd its monster 20.1in widescreen notebook - you can't honestly call this beast a laptop, and even the word 'notebook' seems inappropriate - at Computex this week, one of four machines it is preparing to offer with built-in HD DVD drives.

The Aspire 9800 is a seriously big machine. Acer didn't say what the notebook's dimensions are - or, perhaps wisely, reveal its weight. But you can see from our pics, the screen section's almost as thick as the business end.

The display is a 20.1in, 1,680 x 1,050 job driven by an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics chip with 256MB of dedicated video memory. The notebook has a couple of TV tuners inside too, one digital, the other analogue. There's a DVI-D port to hook the machine up to an HD TV - the notebook can pump out HDCP-protected content.

The machine is based on an Intel Core Duo processor, and provides 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 and a pair of SATA hard drives for up to 240GB of unformatted storage capacity. Its got FireWire, plenty of USB ports, a memory card reader and two PC Card slots. There's a 1.3-megapixel webcam in the screen housing too.

Acer also showed off the Aspire 9110, 9510 and 5670, all of which will, like the 9800, ship with HD DVD drives, the company said - and are eminently more portable than their bulkier sibling, we'd add. ®

Full Computex coverage at Reg Hardware