Acer Unveils Gemstone Blue Laptops March 18, 2008

Read more Blu-ray , Entertainment , Gizmodo UK , HD , HDMI , Laptops , Mobile Devices , Movies , Music , Online , PC

Acer has added a couple of sexy new Blu-ray drive-equipped laptops to its line-up, called Gemstone Blue.

The multimedia laptops sport unusual screen sizes of 16in and 18.4in respectively and, that’s not all, since Acer has also changed the aspect ratio. Most widescreen laptops come with 16:10 aspect ratio screens but these are 16:9, or proper widescreens, which means your HD movies and other widescreen video content should fit a lot better. Both come with HDMI ports too for hooking them up to a HDTV.

The 16in 6920G and 18.4in 8920G have screen resolutions of 1366 x 768 pixels and 1920 x 1,080 pixels. The 18.4in laptop even manages to house 6 speakers, a TV tuner and up to 2 x 320GB hard disk drives. And I do like the addition of a swish dedicated control panel – the CineDash Media Console - for controlling content without having to use Media Player settings.

There’s a choice of nVidia GeForce 9650M GS or 9500M GS graphics cards and both laptops use the latest Intel Penryn processors.

There’s no European release date for these yet but they are coming. In the US, prices for the 6920G and 8920G will be approximately £450 and £850 when they launch in the coming weeks. They will cost more here but, hopefully, not by too much. See a close-up of the control panel below-Martin Lynch

laptop blu-ray acer