Acer Ferrari One Laptop

I think the Acer Ferrari One notebook certainly stands out from the crowd with its personalized racing red cover and zippy performance....

I think the Acer Ferrari One notebook certainly stands out from the crowd with its personalized racing red cover and zippy performance. Inspired by Scuderia Ferrari elements, the Ferrari One definitely sets itself apart from the rest of the notebook field with its scarlet red lid and famous prancing horse badge.

While many not realize, to complete its sporty look, the notebook also features a carbon fiber-design for the palm-rest, Ferrari-engraved touchpad with multi-gesture functionalities and. If you get this, four rubber feet that look like tires. With all of the car-related design ideas, it’s not hard to wonder whether they’re “speeding up” their design in the same way we’re all speeding up with broadband packages and more RAM slotted into the back of our machines. That’s not all; the Ferrari experience even extends to exclusive Ferrari calendars and themes for the desktop.

UNDER THE HOOD

This notebook is not just banking on just its sporty looks to entice customers. With a dual-core 1.2GHz Athlon X2 L310 CPU and 1MB L2 cache in the driver’s seat, it feels snappier and more powerful than a notebook with an Intel Atom processor. Of course, having 4GB of RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics comes in handy, especially when running high definition (HD) movies. It also has a 320GB hard drive so there’s plenty of storage space for all your documents and multimedia files. The notebook also has a built-in Crystal Eye VGA webcam with a low-light enhanced feature that allows it to be used even in a dim environment.

TOUCH HERE

The Ferrari-engraved touchpad supports multi-gesture functionalities. Also available are a myriad of wireless connectivity options including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and even a HSDPA slot. The latter means users can insert their SIM card directly for connecting to a 3G broadband service. It takes about one minute for the Ferrari One to boot up to the pre-installed Windows 7 Home Premium operating system.

The notebook has a 11.6in WXGA LED-backlight screen, which produces sharp and clear images at a native 1,366 x 768-pixel resolution. The keyboard offers comfortable typing with good tactile feedback and is also quite responsive. The multi-gesture touchpad supports two-finger scroll, pinch, rotate and flip features for faster access to the notebook’s functions. All worked quite well, we might add.

STYLISH STOPS

Even the Ferrari One’s rubber feet look like car tires. I had no problems playing my current favorite test game Spore on this machine. Viewing YouTube videos and movie trailers were also not a problem. I installed the KMplayer app to play a 720p version of the Transformers movie and am happy to report that the playback went smoothly with no dropped frames although there was some minimal jitter on some of the frames.

The Ferrari One also has an ATI XGP port, which allows users to hook up an external graphics solution directly to the machine to boost the existing graphics performance. Unfortunately, this feature couldn’t be tested because there was no compatible graphics card available in the office at the time of this review.

Moving on, this model does not offer any HDMI port, which is a shame because now users need to connect two different types of cables — a VGA and an audio — when they want to view movies on a bigger HDTV screen.

It ships with the Dolby Home Theater v3-certified sound system but the problem is that the speaker doesn’t seem loud enough to let users really enjoy the experience. Even at the highest setting, you need to be really close to the notebook to clearly hear the audio details. I also noticed that the fan seemed to be constantly running to cool down the processor.

It is a well-known fact that AMD laptops tend to run warmer than their Intel counterparts but the noise was really quite loud at certain times. When it comes to the test of endurance, the Ferrari One passed with flying colors as it managed to clock up to five hours of battery life on a single charge, which is in line with Acer’s claims.

The notebook was mainly used for word-processing and heavy photo-editing during this time. But when Wi-Fi was switched on, the operational time was reduced by an hour or so. Still, this is not too bad in our book.

THE FINISH LINE

If you can look past the missing HDMI port, noisy cooling fan and a price tag that’s not too wallet-friendly, the Ferrari One is really one good-looking and well-designed machine. It also has enough firepower to run HD movies and regular office productivity applications smoothly. A brain and the looks; both are in one package. What more can you ask for?

Pros

Impressive Ferrari themed design; dual-core processor on a notebook; smooth HD movie playback; good battery life.

Cons

Noisy cooling fan; no HDMI port; slightly pricey.

FERRARI ONE SPECIFICATION

(Acer) Notebook

Processor: AMD Athlon X2 dual-core processor L310 with AMD Hyper Transport 3.0 technology
Chipset: AMD M780G chipset
Memory: 4GB DDR2
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics (up to 2,047MB of Hyper Memory)
Display: 11.6in WXGA Acer CineCrystal LED-backlit TFT LCD
Storage: 320GB hard drive
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, 56K modem, 10/100 Ethernet, Bluetooth
I/O ports: Three USB 2.0 ports, VGA, ATI XGP socket
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Other features: Memory card reader, built-in webcam
Dimensions (W x D x H): 285 x 204 x 30mm
Weight: 1.44kg
Price: USD800

Review unit courtesy of Acer Sales And Services Sdn Bhd, 1800-88-1288 Source