14 DAY TRIAL // The select top influential bloggers worldwide have received Ferraris from Microsoft and AMD. Acer Ferrari 5000 and Acer Ferrari 1000, to be more specific. Not the luxury car produced by the Italian auto manufacturer Fiat, but still a $2,000+ computer. The Giveaway laptops came preinstalled with Windows Ultimate and Microsoft requested that the recipients test the new operating system and provide feedback on their blogs. In total, Microsoft gave away in excess of 90 machines to as many bloggers.
- AMD Turion 64 X2 (dual-core 64-bit) running at 2GHz, with 512KB L2 cache per core; - 2GB RAM 667MHz DDR 2 memory configured in dual-channel mode; - ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics processor with 256MB; - 15.4" WSXGA or WXGA, 16 ms, widescreen; - 160GB SATA HDD; - HD-DVD R/W; - Bluetooth 2.0; - carbon fiber casing; - 802.11 a/b/g wireless LAN; - 5-in-1 media card reader built-in; - 1.3 megapixel digital camera built-in.
But the laptop giveaways steered up a consistent amount of controversy and criticism. The bloggers have been accused of accepting a Microsoft bribe. The Redmond Company denied that the laptops were gifts, or bribes and informed that the bloggers have the option to return the laptops. ?Microsoft's official position is that once these bloggers are done experiencing the product, they can choose what they want to do with them,? revealed a Microsoft representative.
However, the bloggers are taking in heavy fire. Ed Bott was called a whore and has been accused that he is for sale, one user felt that Brandon LeBlanc should die for accepting the Ferrari laptop and these are not the sole examples. In this context, the majority of the bloggers announced that they will either return the Ferrari laptops or give them away once they have finished testing them.