New Acer Blue Gemstone notebooks shave price
Acer Aspire 7735Z
(Credit: Acer)Editor's note: the Acer Aspire AS5739G does not have a Blu-ray drive. The spec has been updated accordingly.)
Prices keep dropping on laptops, and Acer, as always, is right in the middle adding fuel to the budget fires. Monday, Acer announced updates to its Blue Gemstone line of multimedia laptops, with 16x9 LED-backlit displays, Dolby Home Theater surround sound systems, 802.11 b/g/n, multitouch pads, and one-touch Acer Backup Manager included in all models. The most impressive part of the announcement is the price.
The Acer Aspire AS5536 Notebook has a base model starting with a 15.6-inch 16x9 LED-backlit display, a 2.1GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 QL-64 Dual-Core, 3GB of DDR2 RAM, ATI Radeon 3200 graphics, a 320GB hard drive, and DVD burner for $479.99.
Acer's Aspire AS7735Z starts with a 17.1-inch display, a 2.0GHz Pentium T4200, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 250GB hard drive, DVD burner, and an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD for $599.99.
Next up, the AS5739G starts at $749.99, but has a 15.6-inch display, a 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo T6500, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, Nvidia GeForce GT130M graphics with 1GB memory, a DVD burner, 250GB hard drive, and even a fingerprint reader.
Picking up pricewise right where Netbooks leave off, you could get yourself a nice-sounding and big-screened (but in some cases under-CPU-powered) laptop for just a couple hundred more.
All models are available in the U.S. this month.
Scott Stein, a New York Jets fan and CNET senior associate editor, has written about tech, entertainment, video games, and viral culture for outlets including Laptop, Wired, Maxim, Esquire Online, Asylum, and Men's Journal. He also appears on the Digital City podcast. In his spare time, you might see him performing improv in New York City (when he's not being a dad). 
