Hands On: Acer's 20-Inch Notebook

The Acer Aspire 9800 laughs at your 17-inch MacBook Pro. Its screen is not 18, not 19, but 20 inches diagonally. 20.1 if you want to split hairs, and the girth of the Aspire 9800 means it can certainly split them, along with your back, your briefcase, and the wood on your desk.

If you don't buy it, check out the photo. That's the Aspire on the right, a standard 15-inch Toshiba on the left. The Aspire practically wants to eat that little Toshi.

Here's what's under the hood: Intel Core Duo CPU at 2.16GHz. 2GB of RAM. Dual 120GB hard drives. Integrated camera. Nvidia GeForce Go 7600. Bluetooth and 802.11g wireless. And, most interestingly, an HD-DVD optical drive, the first I've ever seen in a notebook.

Performance is faster than anything I've ever encountered to date: 242 points on Sysmark 2004 SE, about 20 percent faster than the best-performing notebooks I've tested (and I've benchmarked about 25 new models in the last month). The enormous screen is a joy to behold: Big, bright, and unmatched on any notebook. The speakers are louder than anything I've heard on a portable, ever.

What's not to like? That snazzy new HD optical drive is buggy as hell. Simply playing a DVD (which offered a surprising hour-plus of battery life) was a frustrating exercise of skips, crashes, and reboots. Mainly this is due to Acer's half-baked custom power management system. Frankly, Windows does a better job on its own. As for the HD player, it probably contributes its share of problems, too.

Then there's the issue of sheer bulk. The screen is actually as thick as the base, making the entire machine about 2.7 inches thick. The screen itself is so heavy that a sturdy plastic stabilizer juts out the back of the base. Without it, the notebook would tip over backwards when it was opened. The weight, 17.3 pounds, is more than our three-month-old child. And he's enormous. Coupled with the dimensions of this computer, simply getting it from one room to another is a real chore.

The Aspire is set to be released "this fall" for a price of $2,799. That's incidentally the same price as a 17-inch MacBook Pro, but the Aspire is nearly three times the size. If you're buying by the pound, the Aspire is definitely the way to go. Anyone looking for something that even hints at portability will want to shy away.