Acer Ferrari One races ahead of netbook pack

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By Jon Bray

Posted on 11 Sep 2009 at 08:08

Acer's new, Ferrari One netbook will be among the first wave of low-cost portables to be based on AMD's new Vision platform.

The netbook will feature the new low-power, mobile processor from AMD – the Athlon X2 Dual-Core L310 – which boasts twin cores, a clock speed of 1.2GHz, 1MB of L2 cache and support for 800MHz DDR2 RAM, plus ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics.

Aimed squarely at the premium end of the netbook market (although it's essentially a souped-up Aspire One), prices for the Ferrari netbook will start at around 440 euros, increasing depending on the configuration and options added.

The Ferrari One will launch on 22 October, to coincide with the official launch of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. It will ship with either a 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium or 64-bit Windows Starter Edition.

There's still no optical drive, but the Ferrari One is well-appointed, at least in netbook terms. It comes equipped with a luxurious 11.6in screen with bright LED backlighting and a crisp resolution of 1,366 x 768. Other specifications include draft-n wireless, Gigabit Ethernet, optional 3G and Bluetooth, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard disk, with more expensive models offering up to 4GB and more capacious hard drives.

There's still no optical drive, but the Ferrari One is well-appointed, at least in netbook terms

Following in the footsteps of the Acer Timeline series of laptops, the Ferrari One boasts a Scrabble-style keyboard that stretches the full width of the chassis and a multitouch trackpad. The latter supports the usual gesture controls, including pinch to zoom, rotation, scrolling, and horizontal flicks for browsing back and forth through web pages or documents.

The new netbook also sees the re-emergence of the ATI XGP interface. This odd-looking socket sits alongside the One's standard D-SUB video output, and allows the connection of an optional docking station, equippined with HDMI port, and six more USB sockets to supplement the three that are arranged around the One's standard three.

Where Acer's new netbook could struggle, however, is longevity away from the mains. Although it ships with a seemingly impressive 5,600mAh, six-cell unit as standard, Acer's press material stated a rather conservative battery life of around five hours, which is around half that we've achieved from the best Atom-based netbooks.

Look out for a full review soon, when we'll report back with full benchmark and battery life scores, plus our verdict on AMD's new mobile processor.