Today in Manhattan's Chelsea district, an Acer press event was largely focused on the company's business plan in the wake of the company's acquisitions of Gateway and Packard Bell. The company spelled out plans to maintain the individual brands in different markets (as well as the Acer-owned eMachines).

The real stars of the show, however, were the Aspire Gemstone Blue 8920g and 6920g, Acer's new multimedia notebooks at the center of its Blue campaign (a multimedia campaign focused on the primary color just after the end of the high-def DVD war--coincidence?).

Aesthetically, the most noticeable aspect of the notebooks is the CineDash media console that sits directly to the left of the keyboard, giving users touch-sensitive control over multimedia. The console takes up the entire height of the 106-key keyboard. The controls seemed fairly smooth in our few precious moments of hands-on time with the notebook.

Acer seemed especially excited about its partnership with Dolby: It will be incorporating Dolby's Home Theater, Tuba CineBass booster, and up to five speakers into the system. An Acer rep assured attendees that the company had taken proper precautions to insure that, despite a subwoofer in the notebook itself, rumblings would not disrupt the spinning hard drive or optical disc.

The notebooks also feature a Blu-ray drive, one or two hard drives with an impressive combined capacity of 640GB, NVidia GeForce graphics, and up to 4GB of DDR2 667-MHz memory. No word on pricing at the moment.