A laptop that can get you a date
Imagine that PC companies got to trade places with car brands for a week. We'd nominate Dell for the Ford Pinto (explodes without warning), Hewlett-Packard for the Honda Accord (looks decent, runs well, but not going to get you a date) and Apple for the Toyota Prius (efficient, stylish, and just a tad pretentious). Acer, perhaps wisely, isn't going to leave it up to us.
The company has been shipping laptops co-sponsored by legendary Italian car maker Scuderia Ferrari for several years, easily distinguished by that distinctive "Ferrari Red" casing and the black thoroughbred logo on the hood. Two new models became available in North America Tuesday, the Ferrari 1000 and the Ferrari 5000. The 1000 is an ultraportable model available only in black, while the 5000 is a larger notebook with a 15.4-inch screen and your choice of red or black.
Both laptops, as well as all the laptops in Acer's Ferrari product line, use AMD's Turion processors. These notebooks come with the dual-core Turion X2 processor, which delivered excellent performance but poor battery life, sort of like a real-world Ferrari. Check out CNET Reviews' take here for more details.
(Photo: Acer)
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
