Product Reviews

After teasing our curiosity over the past couple of weeks, Acer has finally revealed its new range of Blu-ray equipped Aspire Gemstone laptops. The UK launch was a pretty understated affair, and perhaps suitably so, with the restrained styling of the Gemstone Blue range contrasting wonderfully with the gaudy modernity of the Soho Hotel. We managed to prise a pre-production Aspire 8920G from Acer's grasp to give it an exclusive first look.

Visually, the new laptops might not mark any radical departures from the norm, but that's no bad thing. And thankfully there's no sign of the Acer Aspire 5920's beige interior making a resurgence either. Instead, Acer has stuck to classic design cues. The black glossy lids shimmer with a subtle glitter effect, and the Acer logo glows attractively in the centre.

Build quality is reasonable too. Both the base and lid exhibit noticeable flex when you really tug at them, but given the Aspire 8920G's proportions, it's none too surprising.

Open up the sizable lid and the eye is immediately drawn to the glowing block of touch-sensitive media playback buttons situated at the keyboard's left-hand edge. Acer has dubbed this the CineDash but, marketing buzzwords aside, it simply saves fiddling with the trackpad or keyboard when you just want to pause a video or quickly adjust the volume.

When we say sizable, we really mean huge, as the 8920G can lay claim to being the first laptop available with an 18.4in display. With all but the most gargantuan of laptops settling for 17in displays - Dell's briefcase-sized XPS M2010 being one obvious exception to the rule - you might wonder why Acer has super-sized this aspect of the 8920G. One thing is for sure: the sheer size and thigh-crushing 4.17kg weight certainly put paid to any crazy ideas you might have about enjoying Blu-ray movies on the daily commute.

The 8920G's large footprint does have its advantages though. There's plenty of room for the CineDash, a full-sized keyboard and a numeric keypad. It's just a shame the keyboard is nothing special. We have no quibbles with the layout, but the keys themselves have a spongy, slightly indistinct action which isn't ideal for long stretches of typing. One of our pet hates, a half-height Enter key, proved to be an aggravation too.

But, this is a laptop with its eye firmly set on home entertainment, not portability or productivity. To this end, Acer hasn't just made the display bigger, it's also adopted a panel with a movie-friendly 16:9 ratio. Traditional PC displays use a 16:10 ratio which, for movies, makes the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen rather obtrusive. Not so the 8920G, which, thanks to a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, is effortlessly capable of displaying 1080p Blu-ray movies in all their high-definition glory.

Well, most

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of their glory anyway. The 8920G's display is amply bright thanks to dual backlights, and colours are rich and vibrant but, crucially, it lacks fine detail compared to the very best 1080p displays we've seen. Still, for a laptop display it's pretty impressive. Horizontal viewing angles are fantastically wide and, when you're not watching movies, the huge Windows desktop gives plenty of room to work with multiple programs.

The large size of the screen means you can comfortably watch movies at a distance, and by adding a TV tuner (something which is included with more expensive models), it would make a relatively portable Media Center laptop.

A word to the wise though, move more than a metre or two away and, even if you are blessed with 20/20 vision, the human eye will struggle to tell the difference between high-definition and standard-definition movie material. If you want to get all the benefits of HD in a lounge, you'll just have to use the 8920G's HDMI port to connect to a substantially larger HDTV or projector.

Even on its own, watching movies on the Aspire 8920G is still a sensible proposition. Unlike many laptops, which make do with a couple of tinny built-in speakers, the Acer crams in five and a subwoofer. There's no real sense of surround-sound per se, but the multiple speakers manage to create a far more involving spread of sound than most laptops we've encountered. The only real problem is volume; music fares alright, but the huge dynamic swings in movie audio often reduced speech to a barely audible murmur. An option to crush the dynamic range of movie soundtracks would be a welcome one.

The pre-production nature of our unit means that retail models dropping off the production line will have some notable differences in specification. Nonetheless, the 8920G we tested bore quite a few important similarities to the mid-range specification, which will come in at £936.

The processor in question is one of the new Penryn-based Intel Core 2 Duos, the T8300 to be precise. And thanks to its two cores running at 2.4GHz and 3GB of RAM backing them up, the 8920G flew through the Pro benchmarks with a mighty result of 1.26. As the memory complement will swell to 4GB when the 8920G finally hits the market, performance may improve further. Storage will eventually comprise of a single 320GB hard disk, and a Blu-ray writer which writes to both single and double layer Blu-ray media, in addition to every type of DVD media.

Unfortunately we couldn't test the 8920G's graphical capabilities as it had an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT on-board rather than the new mid-range chipset, the GeForce 9500M GS production units will eventually ship with. Going by its performance in Asus's M50SV-AS030G, though, its primary purpose will be for helping to decode Blu-ray video streams, not high resolution gaming. If that's important to you, then you'll just have to opt for one of the pricier configurations equipped with the GeForce 9650M GS instead.

What Acer's Aspire 8920G does offer, however, is a hell of a lot of laptop for a very reasonable price. We'll have to reserve final judgment until one of the final retail units arrive but, going by what we've seen so far, we can't wait.