Acer Ferrari One

The Ferrari name is associated with fast cars, speedy performance, and good looks. Apply that to the laptop world and you’d naturally expect a notebook bearing the Ferrari name to share these characteristics. Acer certainly turns heads with its Ferrari One notebook ($599 as tested), a sleek system that is to traditional ultraportables what the Ferrari F430 is to the Mitsubishi Eclipse. Packed with an AMD Athlon CPU (instead of an Intel ULV processor) and ATI Radeon graphics, Acer’s Ferrari One obviously wants to set itself apart from the crowd. But will it speed past the competition to the checkered flag or end up in a twisted wreck on the side of the track?

Design

The Ferrari One looks like the sportier bad-boy twin of the Acer Aspire 1410. The chassis is nearly identical, but the Ferrari One adds an extra cut to the front of the system for an aerodynamic look. The lid highlights the notebook’s sports car motif with its Ferrari racing red color and the company’s canary yellow emblem embossed into the plastic. Though it’s glossy and attracts a few smudges, the lid doesn’t show them off too badly. Just keep the Turtle Wax handy for public exhibitions.

The similarities with the 1410 continue under the hood, but with key differences. For starters, there are red accents for the matte black of the deck and the notebook’s keys. The power button on the top right achieves a streamlined look with a backlit red glow and swoop. The wrist rest is also graced with a Ferrari logo and a textured pattern evocative of the checkered flag. The red accents continue on the left and right side; a red swoop peels around the VGA port on the left and the Ethernet port on the right.

The six-cell battery sits flush with the system. Overall, the Ferrari One gives an impression of sleekness and speed.

Heat

Though heat and high-octane performance often go hand in hand in the auto world, it isn’t exactly a desirable trait on a notebook. While writing this review we noticed that the underside of the Ferrari One got too hot for comfort. Even with a passive notebook cooler underneath, the excess heat continued to be noticeable. We let the Ferrari One sit idle for 5 minutes before streaming a Hulu clip at full screen. After 15 minutes of playback, we measured the temperatures at key locations. The touchpad was an uncomfortable 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and the space between the G and H keys was 95 degrees, which is just on the edge of tolerable. Unfortunately, the underside of the machine got considerably hot; the left front side measured an unacceptable 110 degrees.

Keyboard and Touchpad

We’ve long been fans of Acer’s FineTip keyboards, and the layout on the Ferrari One is no exception. The keys offered good travel and spring; it took no time to get up to our normal typing speed with few errors. Key size and placement are both good, including those on the left and right edges, which should please shortcut users. The usual suite of extra functions are available from the F key row along the top. Generally the F10 key is unmarked on the Acer systems we’ve seen lately; here the key sports a stylized Formula One car icon with Ferrari printed on its side. Pressing the Fn key and F10 simultaneously launches the Ferrari Web site.

We like the touchpad’s trapezoid shape, but wish that the area was a little bigger. It’s almost 3 inches wide at the top (tapering down to 2.3 inches at the mouse bar), and 1.6 inches tall. The surface is just rough enough for good traction. The multitouch functions are pretty basic—pinch and zoom, rotate, flip, two-finger scroll and sidescroll—and the touch surface itself isn’t too sensitive. We found it somewhat daunting to execute the gestures at first, but didn’t accidentally activate them as we did on the Dell Inspiron 11z.

While we’re appreciative of the mouse bar’s aesthetic, we still prefer two discrete buttons (as with the Aspire 1410). That said, the button is responsive and springy; we didn’t encounter any issues while we wrote this review and played a few games.