tech: Acer Aspire 6935

The Acer Aspire 6935 comes packed with all the tech you’d expect from the latest Acer machine, as well as a few lot of very funky entertainment features.

The 6935 has a wide 16″ screen and a Blu-ray drive for watching high def movies. Sticking to the entertainment theme, there’s also a control panel on the left that allows you to alter the volume and control playback in a very strtrekky manner. There’s also a digital TV tuner and attaching arial, and the whole thing is sleek black with carbon fibre detailing.

Under the hood there’s the Intel Centrino 2 platform which gives you all the usual wireless gubbins you’d expect as well as decent battery life, we got about 2 hours out of this under normal use. In this particular model there’s a Core 2 Duo 8400, 4 GB of RAM, 320GB of hard disk storage and a Geforce 9600 M GT graphics card with 512 megs of dedicated memory, although you can buy lesser or greater technical configurations.

As an added bonus, there’s also Dolby Home Theater audio technology, which renders the Blu-ray sound particularly well across the included speakers, which also pack a dedicated subwoofer in the bottom.

Now obviously this laptop is geared for entertainment - there’s the Blu-ray drive, the audio tech and the fancy touchpad. There’s also an HDMI port to allow you to hook this up to a flat screen TV.

What’s disappointing is that the screen was only 1366×768 resolution which is not full HD and, in fact, is criminally low. Frankly, there’s not much point in going Blu-ray unless you’ve got a full 1080 HD screen in place. Acer does make this with a full 1080 screen so we’d certainly advise spending the extra bit of cash.

The Aspire 6935 is pretty weighty and would never be described as thin and light. But it is certainly unique. In particular, the trackpad looks fantastic, with the surface being seamless across the front of the notebook. The keyboard is also very pleasant to use with full size keys and a very nice ergonomic curve.

The Core 2 Duo processor is as snappy as you’d expect, and blu-ray playback is consequently flawless. The 6935 delivers a great gaming experience thanks to the Nvidia card built in, and we had no problems cranking up Crysis to run at the native resolution of the screen.

Now this model of the Aspire comes in at around £980 and that’s pretty good value for what you get. However, you’re paying a lot of cash for that Blu-ray playback capability and frankly, I think that’s wasted cash given the lack of a 1080 screen. It’s also a little disappointing that the shiny touchpad controls only work in Windows Media Player and Media center and not in any other application, as that really limits their use. If it’s this sort of machine you’re after - an all singing all dancing entertainment demon - then I would spend a couple of 100 pounds extra and get the version with the uprated screen and faster processor. Otherwise, this is a little bit too expensive for most consumers and just misses the mark for most power users. Nonetheless, a solid 4*s if only for the killer looks.