We live in an era of brands and symbols. Everywhere you turn, you will see a celebrity endorse a lifestyle product, be it a perfume, or a more exotic product like a rare scotch. It’s all about good living and heavy spending. It should, therefore, come as no surprise, that PC companies should target this lifestyle segment with stylized products that look great, offer sterling performance and have exclusive branding that sets them apart from the normal crowd.

Recently we had reviewed one such product the Asus Lamborghini VX1 laptop, which was a good effort offering great looks along with decent performance. Today we are checking out a similar product--- Acer’s Ferrari 1002 WTMi. Acer has been tied up with premier car maker Ferrari, for a while now, for co-branding. Their entire range of products, has developed a good reputation for good looks and above average performance. Let us see if the 1002 WTMi is able to keep up to its predecessors.

The 1002WTMi is a 12.1 inch ultra-portable laptop. This is a good thing as, ultra-portable laptops, according to us, are a perfect balance of performance and light-weight mobility.

The 1002WTMi is one of the smartest looking laptops we have ever seen. Unlike the red garish color, that was the previous generation’s hallmark, the new color scheme is closer to a current-generation Ferrari scheme i.e. black body with shades of red skillfully placed to give it a very sleek and sexy look. The only drawback we found was that the body looks "plasticky" when viewed at certain angles due to the construction materials used. The laptop weighs in at a mere 1.4 Kg.

The keyboard area of the laptop retains the same red-black color scheme. The one touch keys for the laptop, at first glance, may appear to be an electronic touchpad but they are not. The keys are actually a metallic plate instead of the plastic cover that is normally used. The keyboard however is a bit cramped, which is an annoying problem with virtually all the ultra-portable laptops we have ever used. Apart from this niggling problem, the keys are slightly elevated as compared to the standard recessed keys. This offers you a good typing speed and control making it fairly comfortable to work on. The touchpad, is one feature of this laptop we really fell in love with. It is slightly sunken and has a smoothness and texture which allows for precise control. This is a very good move as it saves you the trouble of having to buy an external mouse which will block up a vital USB port.

In terms of connectivity, the Ferrari 1002 WTMi is no better or worse than other ultra-portables. There are a total of 3 USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire Port, a Type II PC card slot and a 5-in-1 card reader. The inclusion of Firewire may seem like a good thing but it was actually done to hide a glaring fact that will annoy most users. The laptop itself does not have an inbuilt DVD-RW. Acer instead has bundled an external drive for use with the laptop. This external 6x multiformat DVD burner, has the same branding and color scheme of the laptop so it does not look too bad.