If looks could kill, the Acer Ferrari 3000 would be wanted for murder. But unless you're a fashionista first and foremost, look elsewhere for a better-performing thin-and-light laptop.You have to love Acer's chutzpah in building a bright-red laptop that sports an official Ferrari emblem. And the cheeky move nearly pays off, as the thin-and-light Acer Ferrari 3000 makes every other laptop in our labs seem drab by comparison. But ultimately, this AU$3,299 head-turner comes up short in a few areas, most notably its mediocre, 132-minute battery life. Add to that merely average mobile performance scores and the fact that it runs rather hot to the touch in a couple of areas, and you have a great-looking laptop that can't quite match the best in its class, such as the IBM ThinkPad T41 or the Sony VAIO Z1 series.
The notebook case is adorned in familiar Ferrari red tones.
In an interesting retail move, the Acer Ferrari 3000 is only available in Dick Smith Powerhouse stores and Ferrari dealerships within Australia, which begs the question -- how many people go to a car dealership looking to buy a notebook, exactly?
As much as we like the red exterior, you might get tired of that hue if the entire notebook were red. Thus we're thankful that the 3.63kg (3.07kg sans AC adapter), 33-by-27.1-by-3.05cm Ferrari has a keyboard deck and a screen bezel that are a less-distracting silver. The keyboard has the familiar Acer touch: it curves slightly into a smile, an ergonomic design that Acer uses on several of its laptops. The keyboard feels solid and crisp, but it annoyingly forces you to use the Fn key to access Home or End editing functions, a one-touch procedure on most other keyboards. The touchpad has a silky response, and its two mouse buttons aren't overly stiff like the laptop's cousin's, the Acer Aspire 2000. (However, we prefer the Aspire 2000 and rate it higher than the Ferrari 3000.)
The Acer Ferrari 3000 ships with a bright, 15-inch, 1,400x1,050 display and a DVD-rewritable drive, which together with some decent-sounding speakers on the front edge, make for a pleasant movie experience. The laptop is also extremely well connected, with USB 2.0, mini-FireWire, v.92, 10/100 Ethernet, VGA, S-Video, audio, infrared, and parallel ports. It also has a four-in-one, flash memory-card reader and a PC Card slot.
We expected better mobile performance and longer battery life out of the Acer Ferrari 3000. It comes well equipped, sporting an AMD Athlon 2500+ processor, 512MB of DDR333 SDRAM, a 60GB hard drive, and a 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics chip. But it's important to keep in mind that our benchmark, the industry-standard MobileMark 2002, hasn't been kind to laptops running AMD's Athlon processors. Many of the applications simulated in MobileMark 2002 use Intel processor-specific optimizations. This means that Athlon systems are at a disadvantage when running MobileMark 2002.
Mobile application performance (Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Battery Life (Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Editor's Note: Not all systems listed are available in the Australian market, and are included for comparative purposes only.
Acer Ferrari 3000
Company: Acer
Price: AU$3,299
Distributor: Selected resellers
I just got mine, and i'm thrilled. I could hardly get it home from the office, everyone wanted to play with it like they'd never seen a laptop before.
I do have to wonder about the reviewers that complain about the battery life. They are probably the same guys who would buy a Ferrari and complian about the mileage. I will carry my extra battery as a badge of honor. Either you get it, or you don't.