Want a 20-inch HD-DVD laptop?

ACER IS NOT about to let Clevo take the crown as supplier of the world's most unwieldy laptop with its 19-inch monster. So the Taiwanese champion launched its Aspire 9800 with a 20-inch screen.

This is one huge laptop, but if you don't want to think of it as one, I would not hold it against you. I did hold my cell phone and an HD-DVD case up to it so you could judge the magnitude of this beast.

One thing I will hold against Acer up front is the DRM infected HD-DVD they put in it - neat tech, but the DRM has to go. The laptop also has HDMI outs and the evil HDCP infection too. These are pretty much a huge black spot on an otherwise cool product.

The rest of that product is almost everything you could want. The 20-inch screen is bright, high contrast, and has a 1680x1050 rez with six lamps. Not bad, but it won't do native 1080p. The GPU on board is a GeForce Go 7600 with 256MB GDDR2 and backed up by analog and DVB-T tuners.

The CPU are Yonah's for now, I don't think anything less will do on a notebook of this caliber. You can put in 4GB of DDR2/667, but until Vista ships, 2GB is the practical limit. Add in two HDs, RAIDable to 240GB, and you have a multimedia monster in an almost-portable form.

Whatever the case, Acer has the largest notebook out there for the time being. It is really a media center with a battery that you can lug around, but it does that job surprisingly well. It is feature overkill, a complete 'mine is bigger than yours' machine, and it will undoubtedly do very well for it's intended market. µ