Acer Ferrari One AMD-based Super Netbook To Debut At £399

Acer and AMD are continuing their successful Ferrari-inspired collaboration with the Ferrari One Netbook, a model that goes beyond the bounds of what a netbook normally costs and looks like.

Announced nearly two weeks ago, the Ferrari One was expected to cost as much as £440 but Acer has confirmed that the netbook, which it branded as the "the world’s most exclusive netbook" will be sold for £399 with Windows 7 Home Premium from the 22nd of October.

The fact that it is not an Intel Atom-based netbook means that it will stand out of this normally rather bland segment. It comes with a larger-than-usual 11.6-inch LCD monitor capable of displaying 1366x768 pixels (and therefore qualifies for the HD-ready moniker).

The Ferrari One uses a low power AMD Athlon X2 dual core processor, the L310, which runs at 1.2GHz, coupled with a 780G chipset which hosts an ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics module. The latter - which is part of the new AMD Congo platform - is significantly more powerful than Intel's comparable offerings and meets the requirements for AMD's Vision.

That's not all, the netbook comes with up to 4GB DDR2 memory (the base model comes with 2GB), a 160GB hard disk drive, 802.11n, Bluetooth, a webcam, ATI's proprietary external card technology (although we don't really understand why it's there) plus Dolby Home Theater v3 from Dolby Laboratories (again, perhaps slightly out of place on a two-speaker laptop).

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Our Comments
The Ferrari One is not strictly speaking a netbook, instead we consider it to be a fully fledged ultra-portable laptop. It will compete against much more expensive Intel-based processors and could before long run circles around competitors costing twice the price.

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