Acer Ferrari One

Acer's Ferrari range has traditionally been made up of high-endultraportables with expensive price tags to match. The Acer Ferrari Oneis considerably more affordable, bringing the Ferrari brand to themasses.

It's a stylish and well-made product with high-quality plastics and a cohesive design that creates a premium feel.

Noteverybody will appreciate the Ferrari branding and oddball designtouches – such as the rubber feet that feature a tyre-tread finish orthe bright-red lid and prancing horse badges, but to our eyes it's anattractive netbook.

HD ready screen

The11.6-inch screen is impressive, with a sharp 1366 x 768-pixelresolution. It's one of the brighter panels we've seen, although colourreproduction could be better straight out of the box. We found slightissues with contrast and some colours looking over-exposed.

TheWindows 7 software includes colour calibration tools, however, and wefound it easy to adjust the screen, producing vivid images after slightadjustments.

It's also more than capable when it comes to videoplayback, with the ATi Radeon HD 3200 graphics chip making light workof movies. It'll even run HD films without issue – something that can'tbe said of most netbooks that use Intel's previous-generation GMA 950chipset.

The keyboard offers keys that are among the largestwe've seen on any netbook and are ideally suited to users with bigfingers. It's high quality, with the keys moving responsively andquietly. It won't suit everybody, however, as the keys are completelyflat – and the lack of definition make it easy to make mistakes.

AMD processor

Unlikemost of its Intel Atom-based rivals, an AMD Athlon processor is usedhere. Running at 1.2GHz, the main benefit is that it's a dual-core chip– offering better multitasking capabilities.

We found it smoothand reasonably fast, but while our review sample featured 4096MB ofmemory, base spec models will be sold with 2048MB. An additional 2048MBis available for £30. How much this will affect overall performanceremains to be seen.

The three USB ports are standard fare for anetbook, with a VGA port for an external display. Unusually, you'llfind ATi's XGP port in place, letting you connect a compatible externalgraphics card for enhanced 3D performance.

802.11g Wi-Fi is included, although future models will also boast 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Overall,the Ferrari One is a highly attractive netbook. It's a shame that therearen't more features included as standard, but it still has a lot tooffer. We were particularly impressed by the keyboard, screen andoverall quality.

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