Acer Ferrari One review

24. Jan, 2010 0 Comments

In a similiar vein to the Italian car manufacturer with which it’s partnered, the new Ferrari One netbook from Acer is designed to be sleek, sexy and quick. But does it live up to it’s namesake? We sent our agents to check out what’s under the hood on the new addition to the netbook market.

The Good

At first glance it is obvious that some time has been spent on aesthetics, the glossy scarlet red lid sporting the ever famous prancing horse logo may not be everyones cup of tea but it certainly sets this model apart, we almost felt like cracking out the chamois leather to give it a quick buff up. Even the plastic wristrest has been made to resemble carbon fibre and a quick look underneath will reveal four rubber feet in the style of tyres.

The Ferrari One is a little bigger than most netbooks available at the moment, but boy do Acer make good use of the extra space. The keyboard is quite possibly one of the best we have seen on a notebook and for that matter a large number of laptops, the primary keys are a nice big size and the general keyboard layout is good, it takes no time at all to become comfortable and up to your usual typing speed. The mouse trackpad also allows you to use pinch, stretch or twist gestures similar to that on the Macbooks or iPhones to manipulate things on screen which is a nice touch.

The larger frame also means that Acer could sneak in a 11.6 inch screen which, when compared to the 10 inch screens of the majority of netbooks really makes a lot of difference. The larger screen also means a higher resolution than most of it’s competitors, 1366 x 768 to be exact which provides a nice workable area.

The Ferrari One is not all about style though, from the word go it’s evident that this netbook is a cut above it’s rivals in terms of performance as well, mainly helped along by the fact that it is the first of it’s type to make use of the AMD Athlon X2 L310 CPU, with two cores running at 1.2GHz each and 1MB L2 cache which easily runs the pre-loaded Windows 7 installation. Backing up the CPU is 2GB of RAM which can be expanded to 4GB if required and an integrated ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3200, the latter of which is a huge improvement over the Intel integrated graphics that are shipped with most netbooks. It can even run some of the latest games, albeit at a lower performance level, but still playing the likes of World of Warcraft on this baby should be a walk in the park. It can also quite adequately handle HD streaming/playback.

Acer have gone to great lengthes to highlight the Ferrari One’s audio capability. It ships with a pair of integrated stereo speakers, and its sound card can easily handle Dolby Home Theater v3, which features Dolby Digital Live, Dolby Pro Logic IIx and, more usefully for a netbook, Dolby Headphone, which produces a fairly realistic 5.1-channel surround-sound effect.

Other features include an ample 250GB hard drive, more than enough for the average netbook user, 802.11n Wi-Fi and Gigabyte ethernet. External connectivity on the Ferrari One is mostly as you would expect. It has two USB ports on the right side, along with a five-in-one memory-card reader, a mic jack and a headphone jack that also doubles up as an optical digital SPDIF audio output. The left side houses a third USB port, a D-Sub VGA video output port and something a bit different, an ATI XGP port (More about that in a minute).

The Bad

Now moving on to the things our agents didn’t particularly like (There aren’t many), firstly the ATI XGP port, it allows users to connect an external graphics card which can then output to up to four monitors. Now this sounds nice in theory, but not many are going to be willing to buy another peice of kit for something that may never be used, a nice HDMI output would have been better in our opinion.

The mouse trackpad may take a little getting used too, it is a slightly odd shape and not quite as smooth as some may have used in the past, not that this is a major issue as we quite quickly became accustomed to it but thought it best to highlight.

Conclusion and rating

While we liked the styling and bold appearance of the Ferrari One, obviously it isn’t going to appeal to everyone. But one things for sure, it’s specs and performance make it one of the, if not THE best netbooks available today. Our agents have absolutely no qualms in recommending it to anyone looking for a bit of ompf in their netbook.