I've now had a couple of days with the new Gateway
convertible to build some first impressions and I must say the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. James
and I just finished recording this week's OnTheRun with Tablet
PCs podcast - the first podcast recorded on one of these new units as far as we know - and spend the entire show
describing our impressions and taking an audio tour of the hardware and software. We agree that this is one of the most
solid notebook computers - Tablet, convertible, or standard - that either of use has ever used. And between the two of
us, that's a lot of notebooks!
In no particular order, here are some immediate observations and opinions (after the jump).
The Display: Gorgeous. Incredible color depth and saturation and pretty good off-axis viewing. Interestingly enough, the side-to-side viewing angle is better than the vertical which polarizes a lot more quickly. The display has a very glossy finish, typical of transflective displays which can create some reflection/glare issues in certain lighting conditions. My unit has the ATI Mobility Radeon X600 video card with 64 MB of VRAM and the performance so far has been great. I watched a DVD last night and got smooth playback and excellent audio/video sync. I’ll try a game of Halo soon to see how the card measures up. Oh… and did I mention the display is big? Really useful big - applications like MindManager and Outlook are simply a joy to use with the extra width this display provides (1280 X 768).
The Keyboard: Also big. Full-sized in fact which is a welcome change after using the reduced-size keyboard on the M200 for so long although I’m finding that I need to retain myself a bit looking for the Delete and Windows keys in particular. The keys are quiet and have smooth action with decent travel depth. Using the Fn key, there are controls for audio/video playback, volume and brightness, WiFi, Sleep (Standby mode), and a numeric keypad, just as you’d expect.
The Trackpad: Gateway use a Synaptics track pad. This device has an enormous amount of configurability (hidden from casual view in an Advanced properties dialog). You can use the Trackpad for scrolling, tapping, and other expected functions as well as defining Tap Zones in each corner of the Trackpad that can perform a wide variety of actions you can select from a list.
The Battery: I ordered the high capacity, 12-cell batter with my Tablet and plan to do a run-down test today to see how long it lasts. I did some testing last night and after about 90 minutes of use, the Power Manager was still reporting nearly 90% battery life and over 5 hours of remaining juice. I know from experience that these estimates tend to get smarter over time but I fully expect between 6 and 7 hours of power using minimal power saving settings. I miss the advanced Power Manager Toshiba includes with it’s notebooks but I suspect this battery is so good that a lot of the tweaking I did on the M200 to squeeze maximum battery life will simply not be necessary with the Gateway considering my work style (I’m usually on battery power for 3 hours at most except when flying cross-country).
The Fan: It’s louder than the M200 but that is offset by how cool the Gateway runs. The m200 could get quite toasty and so far the Gateway is barely warm to the touch.
WiFi: Excellent range. I see very little drop-off in signal strength at the extreme ends of my house from my access point and I seem to be getting very accurate reading in terms of signal strength. I do miss the advanced network management tools that Toshiba supplies which included a Profile Manager that would automatically switch between WiFi and Ethernet cable as soon as I pluged or unplugged the unit.
Included software: Both Warner Crocker and Eric Mack have written about the unfortunate tendency many manufacturers have displayed to load a ton of evaluation software onto their offerings. I believe the technical term is “crapware”. Gateway has wisely avoided the temptation to make a buck or two by tossing this stuff onto the system and includes a mimimal ammount of useful software with the new convertibles. My unit came with:
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Microsoft Office OneNote 2003
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Microsoft Works 8.0
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Acrobat Reader 7.0
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CyberLink PowerDVD
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Nero Express (CD burning)
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Tablet PC Enhancement Pack
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Tablet PC Education Pack
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Norton Anti-Virus trial
That’s it. No AOL. NO MSN. No Net Zero. No AT&T Worldnet. I can make an argument for everything they included.
The two Microsoft Tablet PC Packs provide a number of useful applications, games, and utilities to provide an
immediate, out-of-the-box ink experience. Works, while not my cup of tea, is a perfectly useful productivity suite for
students and consumers. OneNote is, of course, indispensable on a Tablet PC. The optical drive utilities are OK - I
tend to use Windows XP’s built-in CD-burning and Windows Media Player for listening to music and watching DVDs because
I don’t do either all that often (that may change with this unit however). I’m not a big fan of Norton Anti-Virus
myself but it would be criminal not to ship some protection. I removed Norton and installed AVG which is the tool I
prefer.
Stickers: Laugh if you want but the tendency to slap stickers all over new laptops is another
disturbing trend which has been commented on quite a bit by some of my Tablet blogging buddies. Gateway limits
themselves to two small stickers (Centrino and Designed for Windows XP), both of which are screen=printed on metal, not
paper or vinyl and (I imagine) easily removed.
1. Wow sounds great! How is it bringing the machine about daily? I've got a 17" PowerBook but it got rather impractical to bring to school everyday in addition to other books so hopefully this is a lot easier to tote about.
Posted at 6:17AM on Dec 19th 2005 by alvin