Acer’s tie up with Ferrari has proved very fruitful for the computer company and presumably also for the car company, since they’ve just repeated the exercise with a new pair of style-rich notebooks. The top-end machine, reviewed here, is the Ferrari 5000, and will set you back just under £1,700. It needs more than a couple of red flashes to justify that price tag.
It’s a big machine; think plastic document wallet and add a centimeter all round to get to its footprint on the desk. It’s dressed in a lightweight carbon-fibre case, in glossy black with a thin Ferrari-red stripe on the lid and in flashes down both sides.
Open it up and there’s a swivelling Web-cam along the top edge of the lid and a keyboard laid out in a shallow crescent below - that should make typing easier on your wrists. In front of that is a wide-angle touch pad and mouse buttons, but if you don’t like touch pads, you can use the bundled, Ferrari-liveried, Bluetooth optical mouse instead. Read More »