Gateway CX2610

Picked up a Gateway CX2610 at Best Buy yesterday (1/18/06). I needed a Tablet PC for roving work, meetings, ad-hoc note taking; I explicitly wanted the ability to use a stylus for free-form doodling, drawing, copy/paste a graphic cutout to e-mail, and so on.

WinXP Tablet PC is pretty nice, both shapes and letters drawn with the stylus get recognized and OCRed/cleaned up (i.e. smoothed).

I bought the Gateway - which I believe is also sold under several other Gateway model numbers such as CX200*, for some odd reason - because it is the only widescreen Tablet PC avl. in the U.S. (at least, as far as I was able to find out) and because in other reviews I had seen that the screen got good (for a Tablet PC) reviews, and because after trying it out in the store for a few minutes I liked it.

First impressions:

- the laptop is well constructed; no creaks, heavy plastic and metal
- the keyboard is great - no flex
- the 14.1" screen (1280x768 native resolution) is very nice - no "haze" that Tablet PCs supposedly usually have (and I am *extremely* picky about screens, having sent back a Dell Inspiron 9300 after 1 hour since I hated the sparkly screen so much); it is a reflective kind but not bad, I was able to sit under a fluorescent fixture and in front of a window and work just fine. The screen is bright enough, but not like a Sony. The viewing angle (maybe due to the touch coating) is narrow enough that if you move your head away from a centered viewing position the LCD will quickly start looking much darker, but it's fine if you keep your head in the middle. There is a button that cycles through four layouts, portrait and landscape X 2 each so no matter how you hold the laptop you can use screen. Very nifty and fast aspect switching.
- performance - subjectively so far - is OK. It has a SATA 5,400 RPM drive, 512 MB DDRII-533, and a Pentium M-1.73 GHz, and performs about as I expected; certainly doesn't knock my socks off. I cleaned off all the garbage software from the factory, that helped a lot already. This is not a gamer laptop, with Intel integrated graphics - but again, fine for my purpose, since I also have a powerful AMD-based desktop PC for heavier-duty work.
- mouse and stylus and buttons on laptop are fine, nice tactile sensations, stylus precision just fine (I did calibrate it, which is easy and fast). Only beef, the mouse buttons (beneath touchpad) somehow are inconvenient, often I find myself fumbling and having to look down to actually get the button. But this is minor.
- the battery sticks out quite a bit from the back, but is rubberized and forms a surprisingly welcome handle. Initial battery life seemed to be good, about 45 minutes of use drained about 20% of battery life.
- the adapter is very small and uses a 2-prong power cable
- the sound is OK, not great; if you care, you'll want headphones and maybe an add-in sound card
- it has b/g wireless and 10/100/1000 LAN. Straightforward; wireless worked right away on a secured (once duly configured, of course) and also on an open wireless network.
- it has a DVD+-RW burner. Comes with Nero OEM edition.
- Software: some stuff aimed at students (uninstalled ), Nero OEM, and the typical garbageware

Overall, I got this for a great price since the CX2618 is out now, but the only difference I saw between my CX2610 and the CX2618 for US$250 more was another 512 MB RAM; all else on the spec sheets looked the same.

I was set on a Turion 64 laptop, but there does not seem to be a good Tablet PC with an AMD chip on the market. It's too bad; the turnable/foldable screen is an incredibly good feature to have (think airplane seatback trays...) and this Gateway is a good midline laptop to boot at an astoundingly good price; it's almost a no-brainer to have the swiveling screen (assuming the swivel holds up mechanically, of course). I wish more laptops were on the market - including some powerful models - with this screen config, esp. since I read from a lot of people lamenting airplane seatback confines; a tablet PC eliminates this problem, since you can either fold the LCD, screen side up on top of the keyboard, or flip the LCD so it faces you with the keyboard *behind* the LCD and near the seatback.

<gripe>
No WinXP CD comes with the laptop, just a silly recovery CD. Is there anyone in the universe who likes it this way? Why can't the PC companies and Microsoft give us two CDs (extra cost, $0.17...), one with the full recovery for people who just want to pop in a CD and one with clean XP for the many of us who like to tweak?
</gripe>

What could be improved about the laptop?
- a REAL Windows XP CD
- less garbageware
- smudges too easily (fingerprints) esp. around LCD
- discrete video option
- DVI output (it has analog only)
- an analog volume dial
... but all that would raise the price and all of it can be lived without. By me, anyway.


That's it for now. Pending a few weeks of break-in, so far I can definitely recommend this laptop if you need to be mobile, if standard typing in ad-hoc situations constrains you, and if a swiveling/folding screen can be a plus for you.

This is my first Gateway; I was very hesitant based on what I've heard about Gateway, but the widescreen+tablet+price combo was irresistible. The buying experience was typical Best Buy; wait a long time for any blue-shirt to notice you are waiting to spend money, then luck out (in my case yesterday) and at least get a friendly, non-condescending one.

Build quality: very solid. It's not a lightweight laptop (the large battery/grip ensures that...), and the case material feels thick. I carry it around a lot and it does not seem in the least flimsy. So yes.

Re the button: no, doesn't bother me a bit; in fact it's kind of cool to flip the screen, lay it flat, then push the button to find the orientation that works well. I can't think of a way to keep flipping the aspect/orientation that doesn't require some sort of "do this now" input, and having the button right there is a lot easier than, say, needing to use the stylus.

More of an update... I finally did use the restore CD to re-image the machine. I was very happy to find that the restore CDs did NOT install any of the garbageware it came with - just a clean copy of XP Tablet PC 2005 edition! So that was very cool.

I also had tried to use my own (legal) Tablet PC CD. Since this machine does not come with a floppy drive, and I could not find one on the Gateway site (which is lousy, by the way, since this machine comes in a number of ever-so-slightly different product IDs - very confusing), and since it has a SATA controller, I knew I would need the dreaded F6 driver floppy since MS is apparently still in the dark DOS ages about this. Anyway </rant> so I got a NEC USB floppy, made the F6 floppy disk, booted to the Tablet PC CD, F6ed, found the driver, went through the bluescreen part of the install fine, then got to the starting Windows part of the install and... could not detect the USB floppy. Did this again and again, tweaked BIOS USB support etc., finally gave up in disgust after consulting forums all over and seeing others with the same insurmountable issue and unable to find whether XP supports *any* USB floppies natively in setup. So that was extremely annoying and time-wasting and while I am not one of the MS-haters, it's about time they got rid of the idiotic floppy requirement. So be forewarned. Anyway, it was then that I tried the restore CD with above-mentioned surprising good result.

Otherwise... the machine works fine in practice but I gave up on using the ink and recognition. It's fine, but when I am in meetings, using the stylus and Journal or OneNote, it's just to slow and sloppy compared to handwriting, plus when meeting is done the screen is covered in smudges from my (not very oily) hand. So I went back to paper and pen for notes, transcribe them later, works fine; so screen/ink useless for me for serious business use. Still, the rotating/flipping/aspect-changing screen is awesome, and I have no idea why every laptop doesn't have this as a standard. Alone in tight airplane seats (why do we tolerate what even cattle would look down on?) the ability to flip the screen so your front neighbor can lean back without squishing your laptop or forcing you to keep it on your lap is a blessing.

Final note, the machine comes with 512MB RAM standard. That's not enough; even normal use with no major progams loaded, the machine drags perceptibly even when scrolling through the start menu. It did this as soon as install was done, even before anything was loaded; it will just pause with disk activity (prob. pagefile access) and then keep going. So a little weak. I may upgrade the RAM and/or throw in a faster HD, or I may give the laptop to the S/O (that's significant other) since her power needs are much less and the ink turned out to be useless.

Battery life, BTW, is excellent. I routinely get 4 hrs even when doing presentations, using projector on external VGA port (not sure if that affects battery life) while running various heavy software packages. Makes the large battery bulge worth it. The screen also continues to be impressive; for a reflective, pen-enabled screen it's very clear and bright, better than most "normal" laptop screens I have seen. Shame Dell can't start using decent screens; they might earn some of my business if they did.

Well, that's it for this machine... Given that maybe two other people have bought or will buy this machine I have probably overdone it by a lot on the wordcount. Still, hope this helps somebody since I sure wish I could have found a review of this machine before I decided to take the plunge and buy it.