The 26th iteration of the world’s second largest computer show, Computex 2006, opened in Taipei today with Taiwanese exhibitors like Acer, BenQ and Asustek taking full opportunity to strut their stuff.

As many of you might already know, Acer will be displaying their latest offerings at Computex, which includes 5 highly anticipated notebooks: The Ferrari 5000, Ferrari 1000, Aspire 9110, Aspire 9510 and Aspire 9800.

Sheesh, why can’t we go?

(Source: Hardware Upgrade Italia)

The previous pictures of the Acer Ferrari 1000 we saw were only of the front-side of the system, leading us (or rather, me) to conclude that it wouldn’t be very much different styling-wise compared to the Ferrari 5000.

Newer pictures, which you can check out at the Inquirer and Hardware Upgrade Italia (which is the source of the pic shown on the left) have shown the world (or rather, just all of you) how wrong I am.

So, just look at those pics and remind yourself how blur I can be.

P.S.: The F1000 looks so much cooler compared to the F5K, doesn’t it?

(Source: Acer)

Although Acer’s official press release didn’t give an estimated recommended retail price for their new Ferrari 5000 notebook, PC World Italia has put an estimate of around 2,500 euros (US$3220) as a possible RRP in Europe (thanks to gweilo8888 for this nice tidbit).

While European prices rarely translate perfectly into US prices, it’s a rough estimate of what techies stateside are going to get. In fact, gweilo8888 has even done some interesting price comparisons to derive an approximate US RRP of US$2,250.

IMHO, that feels about right, but based on some unexplainable instinct, I’d rather put it at around US$2,400 instead.

[News via PC World Italia]

(Source: TrustedReviews)

While the Ferrari 5000 is a desktop replacement notebook, the Acer Ferrari 1000 is the direct opposite: A 12.1″ ultraportable weighing around 1.7kg, equipped with on-board ATI RADEON XPRESS 1150 graphics (up to 512MB Hypermemory).

The F1000 will, like its bigger bro, come with the Acer 1.3 megapixel Orbicam, but (most likely) not with a Bluetooth VOIP phone. Other than this, we still have no idea what kind of specs we’ll be seeing in Acer’s first AMD dual-core ultraportable offering.

Oh yes, the 12.1″ screen is a glossy CrystalBrite widescreen, so glossy-haters will probably have to look elsewhere.

P.S.: We currently have no idea whether the picture attached to Acer’s news release is for the F5000 or F1000, but we’ll presume both look about the same - just different in size. Found a picture of the F1000 thanks to gweilo8888.

(Source: Acer)

Acer has announced its first AMD salvo in the dual core-equipped notebook market with the Acer Ferrari 5000 and 1000. In this post, we’ll be talking only about the Ferrari 5000. Let’s leave the F1000 for the next post.

Anyway, for starters, the Acer Ferrari 5000 comes equipped with a dual-core AMD Turion 64 X2 processor, and like its Intel brothers, is bundled with an Acer VoIP Bluetooth phone and Acer OrbiCam (1.3 megapixel webcam). Moreover, being a 15.4-incher with a DVD-Super Multi double-layer drive (and perhaps even a HD-DVD drive), it shouldn’t be surprising that the F5000 is aimed at the desktop replacement market.

Overall, the Ferrari 5000 looks like a solid offering, but a change in style from Acer’s previous Ferrari offerings would have been nice, though admittedly highly unrealistic.

(Source: NotebookReview.com)

This review of the Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi by X-bit Labs has not only the honour of being the first ever 5th review of a particular notebook model on The Acer Blog, but also one of the few reviews to have a page long (non-technical) introduction of the notebook.

But of course, even the most detailed of reviews come to an end. This review concludes with, “Like any premium model, the notebook boasts high performance, wide communicational capabilities, and superb functionality with all sorts of connectors, ports and interfaces you may want to have. You can perform any task on it, but get ready to be always in the focus of attention as this machine will certainly attract other people’s amazed stares. The single drawback of this model is its high price, but it would be ridiculous for a Ferrari to be cheap, don’t you think?”

(Source: Edcon.se)

An About.com review on a relatively old Acer notebook - the Acer Ferrari 3400LMi - popped up on my RSS reader recently. It’s not a comprehensive or detailed review, and to me, it looks more like an evaluation of technical specifications rather than a real first-hand review given the lack of benchmarks.

In any case, the review is a glowing one, with About.com giving the Ferrari 3400LMi an overall rating of five out of five stars, and concluding with: “The Acer Ferrari truly lives up to its namesake as being an expensive system, but with that price comes an excellent thin and light notebook with tons of performance.”

For the sake of completeness, I’ve started constructing comparison tables for Acer notebooks, in order to compare basic specifications. I’ll start with an overall one, which will contain notebooks of all series, before going into series-specific tables (Yeap, I’m not going to finish it too fast since I need some feedback on the current table design).

I’ll be using Acer US configurations for these tables. However, it is likely that I will go into Acer UK data once I finish with the US configurations.

Given the rather limited fixed width design implemented on this blog, I found it rather difficult to fit in all the various columns necessary for a detailed comparison, but I hope the most important of them are there.

An example is as follows:

So, what do you guys think? Is it sufficient? Anything I need to change before finishing the rest of the tables? Go here (or check out the right sidebar) for the overall table that I’m currently working on.