Medion, the mid-range laptop producer who sell great machines at surprisingly low prices, announced a media-center laptop, the Akoya P8610 at Dolby’s sound laboratories in deepest darkest Soho. It’s a whopping 18.4″ beast of a machine, with Blu-ray drive, and some awesome Dolby sound-enhancing technology.
The aforementioned 18.4″ screen runs at 1,680 x 945 resolution, which the astute among you will recognise as 16:9 aspect ratio. The Dolby audio system will happily output in 5.1 surround, or alternatively you can use the surround virtualisation filter on a stereo signal to make it sound like it’s a surround source, either on a speaker system or on headphones.
Medion is attempting to distinguish itself as more than a supplier of laptops to supermarkets using its Akoya branded products. As with the P8610, these typically have a relatively high specification so they can compete with well-known brands such as Sony while offering better value for money. In line with this ethos, the Akoya P8610 is the company’s first ever Dolby Home Theatre-certified product. Rick Munday, Medion UK’s product manager, stressed that while almost any product can be described as a Dolby Digital product, few are actually Dolby-certified or have Dolby-developed audio management features.
Dolby demonstrated the natural bass and 5.1 audio settings at its London offices yesterday, along with specific settings for expanding the audio when the integrated speaker bar is being used and for headphone use.
Feature-wise, the machine has an 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor, and 4GB of RAM. There’s a 320GB hard drive, and a dedicated 512MB GeForce 9600M GS graphics card, which can run in either full-on mode, or hybrid mode, depending on how much power you fancy using up.
Port-wise, it comes with 3 USB ports, an eSATA/USB port, an HDMI port, LAN and VGA. It’s got 802.11 b/g/draft-n WLAN too. There’s also a 1.3-megapixel camera, and touch-sensitive media controls. It comes with 32-bit Windows Vista, but 64-bit is supplied too, for those of you who want to take advantage of all four gigbytes of RAM. You’ll be pleased to hear that all the fancy Dolby stuff works fine on 64-bit Vista, too.
Last but not least, there’s a digital TV tuner built into the thing, so you can watch Freeview on the device. It comes with some PVR software, and you can record one program while watching another. No more fights about Eastenders vs Never Mind the Buzzcocks.
All-in-all, this is a decent multimedia laptop, and it’s only going to cost $1160. It’ll be available from next week, from Tesco Direct, Blockbuster, and medionshop.co.uk.