Fridae

Like the cars on which it's based, the Acer Ferrari One is designed to be fast, fun to use and good-looking, while remaining relatively affordable compared with its predecessors. But does this S$1,298 (US$922.20) minilaptop, which will be available in late October, live up to the legendary Scuderia Ferrari badge, or is it just another lowly, under-performing hunk of cheap Netbook plastic?

Design

Like its road-going cousins, the Ferrari One will polarize opinion. In many respects, it's the best-looking Netbook we've come across, and many will look upon its owner with an envious eye. But its bawdy, not-quite-Ferrari-red lid will attract plenty of negative attention too, and its large logo will mark you out as the sort of person that owns Ferrari key rings and baseball caps because they can't afford the real thing. You have our blessing to buy the Ferrari One, but be prepared to have people give "mine's bigger than yours" looks.

Aside from the lid, the Ferrari One is a fabulously designed piece of kit. It's slightly larger than most Netbooks, but that's actually a good thing, because its extra girth allows for a huge keyboard that's arguably easier to type on than that of almost any laptop--of any size--we've previously encountered. Each of its primary alphabetical and numerical keys is actually larger than what you'd get on a full-sized desktop keyboard, which is nothing short of miraculous given the Ferrari One's 1.5kg weight and 285 x 24 x 204mm dimensions.

The mouse trackpad is good, too. Its surface isn't quite as smooth as we'd like. Applying anything other than the lightest of pressure causes your digits to skid jerkily across the surface, but it does offer support for multitouch gesture inputs--just like the Apple MacBook range. You can pinch your fingers together or stretch them apart to zoom, twist them to rotate, and swipe to navigate forward or backwards through documents in most applications. This dramatically speeds up use of the device, particularly when browsing the Web.

Features

Physical connectivity on the Ferrari One is mostly very good. It has two USB ports on the right, alongside a 5-in-1 memory card reader, a mic jack and a headphone jack that also doubles as an optical digital SPDIF audio output. The left side has a third USB port, a D-Sub VGA video output port and something we've never seen before--an ATI XGP port. This allows the Ferrari One to connect to an external graphics card, which, in turn, can power up to four separate monitors, run games and display high-definition video.

It's all very clever, but we can't remember the last time we needed to connect a Netbook to more than one display, or when we last wanted to spend our extra dosh on an external graphics card. A simple HDMI port would have been far more useful, as it would have made the Ferrari One an excellent budget media-centric laptop.

The Ferrari One's 11.6-inch display is one of its most striking assets. Not only is it larger than the 10-inch screens you get on the majority of its rivals, but it also has a higher-than-standard resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels. The additional screen real estate is a blessing, since the extra multitasking power offered by the CPU allows users to work with a higher number of application windows open. The screen's glossy finish limits the possibility of using the Ferrari One outside, but the display is noticeably brighter than that of most laptops, which helps its cause in environments where lighting isn't perfectly diffuse. The only drawback is that increasing the brightness puts extra strain on the 4,400mAh battery.

Acer has taken great pains to highlight the Ferrari One's audio playback credentials. It ships with a pair of integrated stereo speakers, which sound pretty decent for a Netbook, and its sound card can handle Dolby Home Theater v3, which features Dolby Digital Live, Dolby Pro Logic IIx and, more usefully for a Netbook, Dolby Headphone. The latter produces a fairly realistic 5.1-channel surround-sound effect in any set of cans.

Acer supplies the Ferrari One with a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, along with Microsoft Works 7, Norton Online Backup, WinDVD, a variety of Acer utilities, and a collection of Ferrari-themed wallpapers and screensavers.