Netbook Review: Acer Ferrari One

The Acer Ferrari One netbook certainly stands out from the crowd with its personalised racing red cover and zippy performance.

Inspired by Scuderia Ferrari elements, the Ferrari One definitely sets itself apart from the rest of the netbook field with its scarlet red lid and famous prancing horse badge.

To complete its sporty look, the netbook also features a carbon fibre-design for the palm-rest, Ferrrari-engraved touchpad with multi-gesture functionalities and... get this, four rubber feet that look like tyres.

That’s not all, the Ferrari experience even extends to exclusive Ferrari calendars and themes for the desktop.

Under the hood

This netbook 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 netbook 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 netbook 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, WiFi 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 netbook 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 netbook’s functions. All worked quite well, we might add.

STYLISH STOPS: Even the Ferrari One’s
rubber feet look like car tyres.

Start your engines

I had no problems playing my current favourite 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 netbook 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 colours 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 netbook was mainly used for wordprocessing and heavy photo-editing during this time. But when WiFi 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 looks, all in one package. What more can you ask for?

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

Cons: Noisy cooling fan; no HDMI port; slightly pricey.

Netbook

Manufacturer: Acer
Processor: AMD Athlon X2 dual-core processor L310 with AMD HyperTransport 3.0 technology
Chipset: AMD M780G chipset
Memory: 4GB DDR2
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics (up to 2,047MB of HyperMemory)
Display: 11.6in WXGA Acer CineCrystal LED-backlit TFT LCD
Storage: 320GB hard drive
Connectivity: WiFi, 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