Acer Ferrari 4005 WLMi review

As an official supplier to the Ferrari Formula One team, Acer is allowed to use the Ferrari name and prancing horse logo on some of its notebooks.

The Ferrari 4005 WLMi is the latest in this line of Formula One tie-ins, and it's far more subdued than previous efforts.

The Ferrari 4005's design is more subtle than that of its predecessors. While the Ferrari 3200 and 3400 had fire-engine red exteriors and silver keyboard surrounds, the Ferrari 4005 has a carbon fibre weave lid with red sides. The keyboard has a matt rubber surround, and the whole design is more tasteful. Build quality is excellent, with a very stiff base and screen.

The 4005 has occupies a fairly large portion of desk space but it's slim and reasonably portable at just over 3kg. It can connect to just about anything, thanks to its four USB2 ports, one FireWire port, D-sub, S-video and DVI video outputs, wireless networking, Bluetooth and infrared connectivity built in. The front of the notebook has a 5-in-1 memory card reader and useful disable switches for wireless networking and Bluetooth, as well as a slot-loading DVD writer that burns double-layer discs.

The soft keyboard surround is very comfortable, and Acer's keyboard is pleasant to use. The keys provide good feedback but not a great deal of travel. The touch pad is large and rectangular to suit the screen's widescreen layout, and its buttons feel well made. The 4005 is shipped with a Ferrari-branded Bluetooth mouse, which looks great, although ours was erratic and difficult to use.

The 4005's 15.4" widescreen LCD has a very high resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels, providing plenty of room for large spreadsheets. Contrast and colour saturation are excellent, and the screen produced some of the deepest blacks we have ever seen on a non-reflective display. However, large blocks of colour can appear grainy.

Although it shares its chassis and graphics chipset with the Acer TravelMate 8104WLMi, which we reviewed in Labs, Shopper June 2005, the Ferrari 4005 has a 2GHz AMD Turion ML-37 processor in place of the TravelMate's 2GHz Pentium M 760. It also has a gigabyte of memory. Its 2D performance is strong, if not quite up to that of its Pentium M-based sibling, but its 3D performance is as good, and it's easily powerful enough to run the latest games. The battery lasted 208 minutes, which is impressive for a powerful notebook, and its 100GB of hard disk space is the most you can currently get in a notebook PC.

Whether or not you would choose Acer's Ferrari over the similar TravelMate 8104 is really a matter of personal taste. Some may find the notebook too showy, but if you can live with the garish exterior this is a well-specified and powerful notebook with a good keyboard and screen, plenty of 2D and 3D performance and many connectivity options at a very good price. It is not quite as fast as the TravelMate, but it's £70 cheaper and feels slightly more robust.