Shane McGlaun04 November 2009, 7:00 AM
Massive 18.4-inch multimedia beast is about as far from ultraportable as you can get, and we love it.
Acer has whipped out a new and massively screened beast of a multimedia computer called the AS8940G-6865 that crams lots of features into a large 18.4-inch form factor. The beast of a notebook has the aforementioned 18.4-inch screen with full 1920 x 1080 resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio. Not quite as interesting as that 3
D displayed notebook Acer unveiled last month, but cool nonetheless.
The big screen is also LED backlit for better colors and to help save on battery life. With a big screen like that and Intel Core i7 720QM processing power, you can count on the battery life from the machines 8-cell 4800mAh battery not being all that great. Acer also crams 4GB of RAM inside the machine along with 500GB of 5400 rpm storage.
For those looking to play HD quality movies, the included Blu-ray drive will play flicks, but it will only burn DVD and CD media. Other features include touch-capacitive media controls, 802.11a/b/g/draft-n WiFi, memory card reader, and HDMI out. The notebook runs windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and has graphics via NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M with 1GB of DDR3 VRAM. The price of the machine will be about $1,500 here in Australia ($US1349.99)plus the gouging that retail outlets like to add. Considering all the features you get, the price of the notebook really is pretty good.