X-bit labs

Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi Notebook Review (page 3)

Category: Mobile

by Alexander Britvin

[ 03/24/2006 | 02:59 PM ]

The widened touchpad is framed in a silvery bezel and is a little shifted to the left off the notebook’s center. It is not sunken too deep in the case. Below the touchpad there are two buttons that serve instead of the mouse’s right and left ones. A 4-positional joystick for scrolling text is placed in between them.

The 88-key ergonomic FineTouch keyboard from Acer is a little curved to minimize hand strain at text typing and is black like the rest of the notebook’s interior. The arrow keys are shifted downwards off the keyboard baseline to avoid accidental presses. The Fn button is conveniently placed second in the bottom row, to the right of Ctrl. This should minimize the risk of errors in such shortcuts as “Ctrl+C” and “Ctrl+V”. There are also numeric buttons and two Windows-oriented buttons here: the Context Menu one is in the bottom row of the keyboard, over the Alt key to the right of the spacebar, and the Windows key is over the left Alt from the spacebar. The functional keys are smaller. Sound volume and screen brightness controls are combined with the arrow keys. Num Lock, Screen Lock, Print Screen, Pause, Insert and Delete are located in the same row with the functional keys. The letters are printed in white and the functional keys in light blue (their additional functions are accessible by pressing them in combination with Fn).

A group of main system indicators is located on the left, above the keyboard and next to the Power On/Off button. This group includes (from left to right):

• Caps Lock indicator
• Num Lock indicator
• Indicator of activity of the hard and optical drive

Quick-launch buttons are placed on the right. These are programmed to start up the following applications:

• E-mail client
• Internet browser
• Acer eManager
• User-defined button (but you can redefine the other three buttons, too)

The Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi is equipped with a widescreen 15.4 display with a maximum resolution of 1680x1050 pixels and an aspect ratio of 16:10 (WSXGA+). The viewing angles are subjectively wide enough, both horizontally and vertically.

Most notebooks from Acer’s current series feature the Glare coating of the screen for higher picture brightness and contrast, but the downside is that you get more light glares on the screen. The new Ferrari from Acer, however, has a matrix with a classical matte anti-glare coating because the matrix itself boasts high brightness and contrast. It means you won’t have a chance to use the screen of this notebook as a mirror. :)

We measured the brightness and contrast of the screen using a Pantone ColorVision Spyder with OptiCAL version 3.7.8 software. These parameters don’t depend much on the power source as you can see:

• AC power source: 105.7cd/sq.m brightness, 99:1 contrast ratio
• DC power source: 106.5cd/sq.m brightness, 105:1 contrast ratio