Acer Ferrari 3000

Acer adds a new shade to the familiar notebook colors of black, silver, titanium, gray, and silver-blue: Rosso Corso—Ferrari's racing red. Those who want a portable computer that stands out can do far worse than the Acer Ferrari 3000 with its bright red cover displaying a gold-and-black prancing stallion—a logo instantly familiar to fans of the Italian sports car.

The Ferrari 3000 pushes the boundaries of thin and light—it's 1.2 inches thick and, if you have to carry the transformer, 7.8 pounds. Leave the grounded 1.2-pound AC adapter at home, though, and your shoulder will regard the 6.6-pound PC as a relatively light burden. Still, at 13.0 by 10.7 inches (WD), this sportster is a little bulky, even for a system with a 15-inch screen.

The SXGA display and multiformat DVD-rewritable drive lay the groundwork for a fine multimedia notebook. The footwork, however, is up to you—the only significant piece of bundled software is an OEM edition of NTI CD & DVD Maker for ripping, adjusting, and burning CDs and DVDs. That leaves you with the task of downloading a free music player, like MusicMatch Jukebox, and installing your own imaging software. The minimalist bundle drops the system down in our multimedia ratings. The Ferrari 3000 is bursting with connectivity, though—Bluetooth, 802.11g, and 10/100 Ethernet.

The case provides some nice touches: four USB 2.0 ports, a single slot that can handle Memory Stick, Smart Media, and SD/MMC cards (you'll have to purchase an adapter, preferably a PC Card one, for Compact Flash), one Type II PC Card slot, and even an ID card holder on the bottom. The keyboard deck has Acer's signature happy-face look—QWERTY keys sculpted into a slight upward smile. To clean fingerprints off the case—and people will want to touch it—there's even a bright red microfiber polishing cloth.

The AMD mobile Athlon XP-M 2500 and 512MB of RAM provided quite good mainstream performance (as measured by Business Winstone 2004), especially for a system with SXGA graphics. (SXGA moves almost twice the number of pixels as XGA—1,470,000 versus 786,432, or 187 percent as many.) Multimedia performance was less stellar, however, and may have been adversely affected by the ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics. Battery life was so-so, at 1 hour 36 minutes for a 65-watt-hour, 0.9 pound battery. Wi-Fi throughput was good, showing little falloff up to a distance of 120 feet.

The textured silver-gray keyboard deck and bottom, small optical mouse (in matching red), and startup sound—a Ferrari Formula One engine roaring across the speakers from right to left—certainly don't dampen this system's unique character. Nor does the clearcoat sealer that protects the brilliant red livery and gives it the same sense of depth you'd see in the paint job on a $200,000 Ferrari.

Performance is adequate, but neither it nor battery life are up to the levels of systems built around Intel's best Pentium CPUs. At the same time, you won't find many other notebooks with rewriteable multiformat DVD drives for $1,900 street. And you won't find any others with that glorious Ferrari color and sound.

Source : www.blogger.com