Digital Home Thoughts: Acer Bends Definition of "Portable" With New 20.1 Inch Screen Laptop

"Well, you can't accuse computer maker Acer of being small-minded: the company has just announced the North American availability of its Aspire 9800 portable computer, sporting 20.1-inch, HD-capable wide-screen display and HD DVD drive. Acer had shown the 9800 at Taipei's Computex show, and has now migrated the product to the North American market, where "bigger is better" might be an easy sell—a point Dell is also trying to prove with its XPS M2010 20-inch sorta-portable behemoth. But the Aspire 9800 comes in cheaper."



This is the Shaft of laptops: one baaaad mutha! Boasting an Intel Centrino Duo mobile processor (speed unknown), twin 120 GB hard drives in a RAID 1 array, and a Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 GPU, this laptop is certainly up to the task of any digital media editing task you could throw at it. Oh, and up to 4 GB of RAM will help those big photo editing tasks along nicely. Pricing starts around $2700 USD and moves upwards depending on configuration. Not surprisingly, the only mention of battery life in the official Acer press release is that the battery will recharge to 80% capacity within one hour...no word on how long the battery will actually last. I'd guess about 45 minutes or so, given the power strain of lighting up that huge screen and two hard drives.