[For full specs and feature description please refer to your local Acer website. Specifics vary from country to country, and I prefer to focus on things which are relevant to your purchasing decision and my feelings about the machine]
As usual, my requirements were simple. I wanted every conceivable feature, ultimate performance and a large screen in a small portable form factor. I’d even thought of abandoning a laptop for once, and settling for a desktop machine at half the price, but after having lived previously with a succession of laptops by Amstrad, Apple, Toshiba, Gateway, Compaq, HP and most recently Acer, I have to admit, I am a laptop junkie.
So I scoured the market for small, powerful machines, and was amazed how little I found that pressed my mouse-buttons. As an Information Architect, I often use page layout and image editing software, so I needed a fast processor, at least 2 Gig, and a dedicated graphics processing unit. Despite that sort of spec being available for some time, the market seems to be splitting into ‘desktop replacement’ machines which are big, heavy and fast, and very portable to ultraportable machines which are underpowered. The middle ground—the portable desktop replacement—seems strangely vacant. There are quite a few machines with 15.4” widescreens, but most have shared video and processors less than 2 Gig. Not for me.
So I narrowed the field, on paper at first, to the Sony Vaio S Series, which have fast processors and 13.3” widescreens in a sub 2 kg package. But when I saw one in person I realised that the screen was just too small for the sort of work I want to do. It’s certainly a machine of choice for real portability with some power, though.
Also on the list was the HP Compaq nx8220. Average looks, but great spec, wide 15.4 screen, 2.85 kg weight. Problem is, the screen doesn’t go bright enough, and the backlight was very uneven. HP built a great machine there and put a rubbish screen on it. Inexplicable.
So that left three Acer machines on the list, the Ferrari 4005 and Travelmates 8104 and 8106. These are basically all the same machine. Same screen, keyboard, form factor, graphics card. The Ferrari is encased in beautiful rubber and carbon-fibre and adorned with Ferrari badges to signify Acer’s sponsorship of the Ferrari racing team. Sounds gauche, and in fact the last model was, but this one is all done in the best possible taste. It’s the coolest looking laptop in the world. It differs from the 8104 in that it has an AMD 2 Gig chip and a slightly higher clock speed on the graphics processing unit. Otherwise it’s much the same. The 8106 is just a 2.26 Gig Intel version of the 2.0 Gig Intel-based 8104, but at the time of writing that’s the latest Pentium mobile processor so comes at a price premium which I couldn’t justify.
If you read my Epinions review of the
Acer Ferrari, you’ll see that I loved the machine, but hated the rubberised coating on the palm-rest (“Unfortunately, I found it felt absolutely awful under my palms. My hands didn't move easily over it, rather the slightest bit of dust or dirt on the palm rest felt really gritty and I found myself constantly dusting the wretched thing down. I simply could not have seriously considered living with that.”)
So there you have it. It had to be the 8104. And when I opened the box in the shop I got an unexpected bonus--I found that my 8104 had a different finish to every other one in the shop or that I had seen elsewhere. Instead of the plain-Jane silver lid, this one has a metallic, textured, carbon-fibre-looking finish which looks like a silver version of the Ferrari. It's still not as stunning as the Ferrari itself, but far better than the usual finish.
I love this machine. It’s very fast, very stylish, has an excellent bright display (1680 x 1050) with no dud pixels (my second successive Acer with no duds), and has every feature I could conceivably need. I am gradually getting used to the curved keyboard, the keys are decent and the feel good, thought the travel is a little short. Unusually, my machine shipped with a 120 GB SATA hard drive, the latest thing, and not the standard Acer Spec (like the finish). I don’t know if there’s any speed advantage as I really don’t have a comparison, but some people claim the SATA (Serial ATA) drives are faster than the old Parallel ATA drives.
On the negative side, I hate the track pad, but then I hate all track pads. The sound quality through the inbuilt speakers is poor-to-middling, better than my previous Acer, but not as good as the HP nx8220, though no laptop is outstanding in this area. The machine runs a little warm at times, and the fan noise is a little intrusive when working at home, though I’d never notice it in an office. The positioning of the USB ports on the right of the machine seems to constantly foul the DVD drive, and why do in-built card readers never support Compact Flash, the medium still used by almost all Digital SLRs? When all’s said and done, every laptop has its quirks, and this one is no different, though as near to perfect as can be imagined.
How closely does this machine meet my initially stated requirements? Well, it’s pretty close. It’s as physically small as it can be considering a 15.4” widescreen display, but lighter than it looks at 2.9 kg. I need to get a bigger laptop bag than my trusty old Crumpler, but I’ll actually be lugging a little less weight than my last laptop. So I’d rather that it were lighter still, but accept that my need for a lot of pixels requires weight compromises, and this is a pretty good set of compromises.
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A note on screens: If you’ve been looking at laptops recently you’ll realise that the latest trend in screens is to abandon the old matte, etched screens in favour of new shiny ones. This is supposed to increase brightness and contrast, and it does that perceptibly. However, these screens are coated with an ‘anti-reflection’ layer, rather like the chemical coating put on optical glasses. Depending on the manufacturer the anti-reflective effect ranges from absolutely useless to moderately effective. Sony’s screens look best to me, but even there, the reflections are quite noticeable, and the bigger the screen the worse they are.
If you watch a laptop playing a stunning DVD in-store, then these screens look pretty good. In real life, a laptop is for computing, and I can’t imagine how those reflective screens would be any less than constantly annoying in the varying lighting conditions under which a laptop is used. I am sure the reflective chemical layers will improve and in 3 ears time they may be amazing. But for know they are amazingly awful—don’t be fooled by the sales rhetoric. The problem for consumers is that higher spec machines are increasingly only available with the shiny screens. That’s a strength of this Acer range for now, but they may well be on the shiny screen bandwagon next model update
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