Acer launch Ferrari 4000 - EXCLUSIVE

Vroom Vroom

24 May 2005 8:32 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Amongst the glitz of the 2005 Monaco Grand Prix in Monte Carlo, Acer and Ferrari have unveiled the latest Ferrari branded laptop to a gathering of selected Journalists. Pocket-lint.co.uk was invited to the event as the only UK technology publication to get the low-down on the new model.

The Acer Ferrari 4000 is a complete upgrade both inside and out on the 3200 and 3400 models presented over the past two years.

Coming in a sleek black and grey chequer pattern, rather than the Ferrari Red of previous models, the black Ferrari stallion on the yellow shield takes pride and place on the top of the model (see images). The top of the laptop has been made from carbon fibre and Acer believes it is the first to mass-produce carbon fibre for a laptop all just to give it greater strength.

The inside sees a rubberised surface surround a slightly curved (5 degrees) keyboard. The rubberised top supposedly gives more grip when using the keyboard. The sides are coloured red. Open the unit up and you are presented with a 15.4in TFT display.

The level of detail is very high mostly thanks to Ferrari's insistence that the design and finish be to the highest specs. According to a Ferrari spokeswomen to talked to at the event “over 40 percent of the finished units don't make the grade because the finish isn't good enough.”

Get passed that highly polished finish and under the hood and the laptop contains a AMD Turion 64 Mobile chip with an PCI express ATI mobility Radeon X700 graphics card with 128Mb DDR memory, 1Gb of DDR memory and a 100Gb hard drive.

Also included is a DVD super multi double layer drive and a 5-in-1 card reader that supports SD, MemoryStick and MemoryStick PRO and xD-Picture Card.

The Acer Ferrari 4000 also features Wi-fi and Bluetooth, both of which can be activated but a shortcut key on the edge of the unit and comes with a built in modem and network card for wired connections.

Ports wise the Ferrari has plenty: 4 USB 2.0 ports, S-Video out, Firewire, DVI-D, PC card slot, Headphones/speaker/line-out port with S/PDIF support, Microphone/line-in port and VGA for an external display.

Acer has yet to set a price for the model, but judging by previous Ferrari models be expected to pay a premium for that prancing horse involvement.