Acer Blue laptop revealed

It turns out Acer's Blue is a desktop replacement laptop with a bunch of entertainment-oriented features. It's also not a "concept PC," as the invitation to today's press event suggested, but an actual product that will be available in about a month. The marketing department got a bit carried away, but there's nothing wrong with the Aspire Gemstone Blue. In fact, it has several interesting features.

Aside from the blue color, the most distinctive feature is the display. The Aspire 6920G has a 16-inch display and the Aspire 8920G has an 18.4-inch display. Both are widescreen 16:9 displays with a full HD 1080p (1,920-by-1,080) resolution for viewing HD content from the internal Blu-ray drive or other sources. Though these aren't the first notebooks to employ capacitive touch media controls, the design of the so-called CineDash Media Control is unique.

Both models have Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) processors, up to 4GB of memory, hard drives up to 320GB, and Nvidia GeForce 9500M GS graphics with 512MB memory. The 8920G can also be upgraded to the Nvidia GeForce 9650M GS, also with 512MB. The 6920G has 2.1 surround-sound speakers and the 8920G has 5.1 surround-sound speakers.

Even without exact specs for the starting configurations, the prices also look pretty compelling. Acer says they will range from $900 for basic models to $1,700 for well-equipped systems.