Laptop-Review.eu

Acer is becoming a classic here at Laptop-Review, and as all the other notebook makers out there, they are steadily introducing new products to the delight of consumers.
This time around we review Acer’s Ferrari One 200. Collaboration with Ferrari has made it possible to deliver this fast netbook filled to the brim with a bit of everything. Hopefully the performance will match the price, for this is not one of the cheapest models around. We take a closer look at the red devil, clad in AMD’s X2 processor.

The product was kindly lent to us by Acer.com

Specifications

Category
Business, Students

Processor  
AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core 1.2 GHz L310

Chipset
GS45-based

RAM
3072 MB DDR2 SDRAM

Hard drive
320 GB RPM SATA

Display
TFT LED 11.6 inch 1366x768 Glossy

Sound card & speakers
High Definition Audio

GPU
ATI Radeon HD 3200

Battery
6-celled Lithium-ion battery (Li-Ion)

Optical drive
N/A

I/Os
3x USB 2.0 ports   
1x Headphones/speaker/line-out combo Microphone-in jack  
1x Ethernet (RJ-45)
1x DC-in jack for AC adapter
1x 5-1 Multi card reader
1x Webcam Crystal Eye
1x Microphone
1x Docking port

Wireless connectivity
Wireless 802.11 b/g/

Dimensions
30x285x204 mm
About 1.5 kg including battery

Support
Support is available via Acer

Warranty
1 year

Operating system
Windows 7 Home Premium

Software included:
WinDVD
Cyberlink PowerDVD
Acer Launch Manager
Google Toolbar
Microsoft. NET Framework 2.0
Adobe Flash Player 10
Google Setup
Windows Live Essentials - Wave 3
Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition SP1 (Trial)
Acer GridVista
Adobe Reader 9.1
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0
Norton Online Backup
Microsoft Office Personal 2007
Acer Crystal Eye
Microsoft Works 9.0
McAfee Internet Security Suite (60 day trial)
Acer eRecovery Management

Price
About £400

Package contents

The box contains a warranty certificate and manuals, as well as the power supply and of course the netbook itself.

Included
- AC adapter
- Manuals and warranty certificate

Construction & Design

The first impression



For a while now, Acer has sponsored the Scuderia race and have in return been allowed to use Ferrari’s famous logo on some of their fastest products.
The time has come to get such a product in the netbook segment, and we are lucky enough to review it. With the name and logo come of course the standard Ferrari colours, which is why the lid is red as can be, a colour that is also featured in other places on the device, for example by the power button.  



The materials are up to Acer’s normal standards and quite sleek. The device itself is sort of rounded and soft, which fits the design of Ferrari’s cars quite well. The keyboard and touchpad work really well together and seem to be of high quality. Acer sometimes have a habit of placing their touchpads in odd places, but in this case the location is perfect.



The device has ports located towards the back, which means wires and such will not get in the way. The DC-in jack is an exception though, which can make it hard to use things like the Kensington lock slot. The diodes are also quite stylish, and all in all it is an interesting product because the design process was clearly very thorough.

The display gets a decent resolution and the size is alright – you certainly will not complain about the size if you are the type who travels a lot. The audial aspect is not the best as is almost always the case with netbooks, but the product still makes a very good overall impression.



The touchpad has multitouch functions that do not work too well in my opinion, but if you just use one finger the touchpad works like a charm.




It is hard to open up the computer with one hand, but on the plus side the hinges are quite strong. The battery is located at the bottom, integrated below the display so it does not get in the way.



The lid



The lid is clad in red on the exterior, and Acer’s logo is in the corner as usual. This time the Ferrari logo is right in the middle, and that of course looks very cool. The lid is black on the interior and tends to attract fingerprints and smudges.

The hinges are very strong and tight, so much that I am sure they will hold up the lid without it shaking. That is quite practical when you travel a lot with the device.



The front



At the front are the diodes, and besides those are two switches for Bluetooth and WiFi.

The rear



The display slides down at the back when opened, so there is little of interest here.

The bottom



Not much at the bottom either. There are lids for various hardware components, and the serial number of the OS. Not something you need every day.

The right side



The left side



Overview



It has the I/Os you need, but not much more. One might have wished for an HDMI output, but otherwise it has the standards and plenty of them.

The only otherwise unique I/O is the docking port so you can connect your netbook to your office setup.

Diodes





The diodes are at the top left and right, as well as in the front. They shine with three different colours: red, blue and white. I personally think they could have toned that down a bit to conform more to the overall design. The diodes indicate the status of the standards like Bluetooth, WiFi and capslock.

They shine quite brightly – some may prefer this, although I find they draw too much attention.

Keyboard and touchpad





I am well impressed with the keyboard. It is incredibly nice to type with and the keys are large compared to how small the device is. It does not flex or bend, meaning it is kept in place by a relatively hard shell. There are plenty of secondary functions that you use via the FN key – there is even a Ferrari button whose function I will not reveal, as it is something you just have to try.

The touchpad is not very large and the multitouch functions they advertise are there work, but there is so little space that it is hard to make good use of them. It mostly seems like they added multitouch just for the sake of it. At least it works well enough with just one finger. The buttons are alright as well, but integrated into a single bar which is something I hope they will soon stop doing. It works just better if you split it up. The words ’Ferrari One’ are handsomely printed on the button.

Display




The display is an 11.6 incher and can run a resolution of 1368 x 768 pixels, which is very nice for surfing the web. It is glossy but certainly does not suffer as much from glare as others I have reviewed. I actually think the display is very nice for a netbook – they have really made and effort here and it is something you will appreciate in the long run.

It is a TFT display with LED backlighting, so the contrast and lighting are both very good.

We have started testing displays for dead pixels and faults in the backlighting. For that we use a program called MonitorTest. It works by for example blackening the entire display, which will expose the ones who do not change colour as dead pixels. It will also allow you to see if the backlighting is uneven.

Luckily there are no problems with this display.

Sound and speakers
The netbook delivers decent enough sound, though it can hardly be described as vibrant. You will probably not be able to listen to your favourite music all day without going completely bonkers, but you can live with various sounds from the internet and conversations over Skype.
It is far from the worst netbook sound I have been exposed to, it just does not have very much life to it so I would say the device’s strengths are definitely elsewhere.

Noise, heat and power consumption

The computer is very silent, practically impossible to hear even at full performance. You can only appreciate that.
It also remains very cool, and I can imagine you would be alright with it on your lap during a train ride or such. It is not very nice to sit with a computer that almost burns your fingers.

It should hopefully be able to last for 3-4 hours of active use for travellers to get the most out of it. We are looking forward to seeing how it does in the battery test.

Benchmark

All benchmarks are run at highest performance settings on the laptop. Otherwise no settings are tampered with.

Windows Vista Experience Index



This computer did not receive a rating for reasons unknown. I would expect it to score well enough though.

I have decided to compare it with the HP mini Vivienne Tam Edition. It is a netbook that costs about the same, but I think you will be surprised at how much extra performance you get here in Acer Ferrari One.

The HP Mini Vivienne Tam Edition device had the following specifications:

Category
Students, the design conscious, casual surfers.

Processor
Intel® Atom™ processor N270, 1.60 GHz

Chipset
Intel® 945GSE Chipset

RAM
Supports up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM

Hard drive
SATA-harddisk 80 GB, 4200 o/m

Display
10.1” WSVGA HP LED Brightview Infinity widescreen

Sound card and speakers
3D Sound Blaster Pro-compatible sound 16 bit integrated
Generic stereo
Webcam with integrated microphone

GPU
Shared

Battery
3-celled Lithium-ion battery (Li-Ion)

I/Os
2x USB 2.0
1x 1 RJ45 Ethernet port
2x Combo-port for headphones and microphone, expansionary port
1x 2-in-1 card reader that supports SD/MMC formats

Wireless connectivity
802.11b/g WLAN
Bluetooth® wireless network

Dimensions
26.17 cm (W) x 16.67 cm (D) x 2.52 cm (H)
1.02 kg incl. battery
92% full-sized keyboard

Support
Support is available via HP

Warranty
1 year collect and return, spare parts and labour
The product warranty can be extended such that probable defects are covered for up to three years; ask your local HP retailer

Operating system
Original Windows® XP Home Service Pack 3 (32-bit)

Software included
Recovery-CD/DVD
Symantec™ Norton Internet Security™ 2009 (60 days live update)
Help and Support for portable PC
Microsoft® Works

Price
About £450 including VAT

Read the review here


Boot times and out of standby



Boot and out of standby times are measured from when the power button is pressed and the Windows desktop appears.

Not much of a difference here, although the Ferrari is a bit quicker. Lower boot time is always an advantage, but it may just be because of Windows 7.

Battery life



Idle times are measured at powersaving profile on the tested models, while Classic are measured at high performance profile. Both are tested with BatteryEater 2005 to find the maximum battery life at given settings.

Acer promise their product will last longer than this. I do not know if I received a poor test battery, but it lasted much shorter than I expected. I think you can expect at least an hour or two more from a new model, but these are the results.

The processor

SuperPi



SuperPi calculates the number Pi with 1 million decimals. The result is a time in seconds, hence lower is better. The number can be directly compared with other devices that have run the same test.

The processor in the Acer Ferrari One crunches the numbers slightly faster than HP’s processor. This is something you will notice in day to day tasks.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic



SiSoft Sandra's Whetstone and Drystone benchmarks tests the processor’s ability to carry out pure number crunching that occurs during gaming or photo editing. The measure is in Mflops (Millioner of Floating Point Operationer Per Second), and higher is better.

For the same price you get a lot more number crunching from Acer’s processor. Of course it is a newer model, and HP may be charging a premium for the design while skimping a bit on the hardware.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Multimedia



The Multimedia test in SiSoft Sandra performs calculations on a 2D figure. The result (it/s) is Mandelbrot iterations per second, and bigger is better.

Again we can spot the same difference. It is nice to see what the right choice can do for the performance of a computer, proving that there is reason to examine several different models that share the same price before you buy.

RAM SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth



SiSoft Sandra’s Memory Bandwidth benchmark is used to measure the RAM performance. The greater the value, the better.

Not much to say here. The Acer generally outperforms the HP in all areas, here included.

Hard drive performance - SiSoft Sandra Harddisk Read



SiSoft Sandra’s hard drive test module is used to measure the performance of the drive.

HP performs poorly while Acer performs as a standard 5400RPM drive should. No complaints here, although you might think it would have been appropriate to fit a Ferrari with a 7200RPM drive, but no.

GPU performance - 3Dmark



The 3Dmark tests show the performance in DirectX 9, and paint a picture of performance in newer games and programs. No tests have been carried out in DirectX 10.1, though both GPUs support it.

The HP has a shared GPU while the one in the Acer is dedicated, and that makes a difference. You should never expect to do too much gaming on a netbook, but here you can possibly get older games to run fluently though newer games may be a challenge. It is nice to see they did not ignore this area completely.

Overall performance



The PCMark05 results can be compared directly with other laptops that have run the same PCMark version. The program gives a score based on tests of the processor, RAM, hard drive, GPU etc.

This test did unfortunately not work.

OpenOffice – mostly for students



Since we have reviewed several laptops so well suited for student use, I have decided to run some average start-up times in OpenOffice, a free program that can do the same as the Office Package (Word, Excel, Powerpoint).

Here are load times of standard applications. It gives you an idea of how long it takes to open up various programs, and the results are actually quite nice.

Conclusion

Acer deliver an exciting and good product. I personally find it fun to wrap a model in a nice design like this handsome Ferrari model. They captured it all, from the red colour and logos to the sound of a Ferrari when it starts up. Quite fancy, although it is probably only for a very narrow segment of the market.
The shell itself and all the physical aspects are of good quality. It has an aura of an expensive but good notebook, and you “believe” in the materials. It has a perfect keyboard which is large and great to type with, and a razor-sharp display rich in contrast with a good resolution for its size. Besides that it looks very sleek, and though it is somewhat “Ferrari fanatical”, this model is sure to invoke feelings of envy in anyone who looks at it.
Fortunately for Ferrari, their good reputation is not besmirched by this netbook.
Things to criticise are, according to my results, a battery that could be better. It does not last quite long enough for you to go without an outlet when travelling. Whether that works for you is something you seriously have to consider.

Furthermore I do not think the touchpad buttons works quite as well as they could. They are integrated into a single bar and that will probably annoy many. You have to go to the very edges of the bar to click, and it would have been so much easier if they had just split it into two buttons.
I will be the first to admit those are minor points, for I am in fact quite happy with this product and think it excellent – but then again, it pretty much has to be for £400 when you consider it is just a netbook.

You can get a lot of joy out of a product like this. The design is unique to say the least, which only makes it that much more fun. But behind the red Ferrari colours, another excellent device from Acer lurks.



Pros
- Design
- Materials
- Display
- Weight
- Quality

Cons
- Touchpad buttons
- Battery
- No HDMI























Battery:	2 / 5
Graphics:	4 / 5
Construction:	4,5 / 5
Mobility:	4,5 / 5
Software:	4 / 5
CPU Performance:	4 / 5
Innovation:	4,5 / 5
Price:	3,5 / 5
Design:	4,5 / 5
Weight:	4 / 5
Performance:	4,5 / 5
Overall:	4 / 5