Design and Ergonomics: Acer Ferrari 3200

The drivers take their positions at the start of a race according to the place they have taken during the qualification, and now is the right time to take a look at the design and the aerodynamic properties of the cars… I mean notebooks.

Red is a bright, eye-catching color. This is the color of the cars of the Ferrari team, and this is also the color of the Acer Ferrari 3200 notebook. More precisely, the notebook combines red and silvery. The lid is made of bright red plastic with a sleek and glossy surface (yes, it looks cool, but it’s not very practical since your fingerprints are perfectly visible on the lid, and your trying to wipe them off would only lead to microscopic scratches which are not good, either). The Ferrari label, a prancing horse, embellishes the bottom right corner of the notebook’s lid. An oval silvery insertion with the name of the manufacturer of the notebook is placed into the center of the lid. The sides of the computer are red with a silver edging. The bottom of the case is all silvery. The lid open, you don’t see any trace of the red color on the top panel, but it doesn’t spoil the impression – the Ferrari 3200 does stand out of the crowd of standard black-gray models.

The design of the Acer Ferrari 3200 resembles the TravelMate 6003LCi model I described in an earlier article (please, see our article called Acer TravelMate Notebooks: Similar Looks, Different Contents for details). We’ve got the same power-on button here and four keys to launch frequently used applications (e-mail client and Internet browser, and two keys are defined by the user) above the top line of the keyboard. The hole of the integrated microphone is located in the top right corner, next to the screen hinge.

The system status indicators are split into two groups on this notebook. The first group is placed to the right, above the keyboard, and consists of HDD activity, Num Lock and Caps Lock indicators (all highlighted with bright green). The second group is found on the front panel and is visible irrespective of the position of the notebook’s lid. This group includes power-on and battery charge indictors (the latter is green when the battery is fully charged and orange when the battery is being recharged), an InviLink WLAN indicator (it goes alight when the integrated adapter is receiving or sending network packets), and a Bluetooth connection indicator.

The keyboard of the Ferrari 3200 deviates from the standard: it is slightly curved and the corner buttons are canted a little. The edging is round at the corners too, adding a kind of streamlined look to the computer. The black keys are full-sized, but the top row of functional keys have a diminished size. A numeric pad and two Windows keys are available here. The cursor-controlling keys are rather unhandy since the arrow right and left buttons are smaller than the others, and there’re Page Up/Home and Page Down/End buttons on the sides which can be accidentally pressed upon. The letters are white, the functional keys are blue (press and hold [Fn] to use them).

A few useful keyboard combinations are available: Fn+F6 turns the screen off to save power; Fn+F7 turns the touchpad on and off to avoid an accidental touch when you’re typing text; Fn+F8 disables/enables the sound.

The touchpad matches the keyboard’s design and has rounded corners and a frame, too. Besides the two standard buttons that replace the mouse’s ones, there’s also an oval-shaped 4-position joystick for vertical and horizontal scrolling.

The 15” screen with a diagonal of 15 inches and a maximum resolution of 1400x1050 is sufficiently bright, with good color reproduction and viewing angles. To control the brightness of the screen you use appropriate functional keys (there’s no scale or something that would appear to show you the current setting, but one does appear when you’re adjusting the sound volume). The brightness range isn’t very big, and you can comfortably read text having set the screen to its minimal brightness.

Besides the lid latch the front panel of this notebook carries the following: a Bluetooth connection button, an InviLink (WLAN) connection button, an IrDA port, a card-reader (supports Smart Media, Memory Stick, MultiMedia and SecureDigital formats), and two stereo speakers on the sides.