HP unveils 16 inch budget-friendly laptop

Hewlett-Packard will today take the wraps off a new portable laptop with a large screen for a price that falls far lower than competing products.

The Compaq Presario 3005US will sport a 16-inch screen, a 2GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of memory, a 40GB hard drive and a combination CD-Rewritable/DVD-ROM drive. The screen, by far the largest offered by a HP laptop to date, offers SXGA resolution, or 1280 pixels by 1024 pixels.

The new laptop will be unveiled at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas.

Notebooks with 16-inch screens are still rare - and fairly expensive. HP's laptop undercuts rival 16-inch models from Toshiba and Sony, company representatives said.

The Presario 3005US will be priced in the US at $1,899 before a $100 mail-in rebate - $900 less than Toshiba's Satellite 1955-S803, and $200 less than Sony's Vaio PCG-GRV550.

John G Spooner writes for News.com