Strange things happen when you walk into a Bestbuy store. More often than not, observant gadget hounds will find the newest, often unreleased products sitting on a shelf. Tonight was such a night – when looking through their assortment of overpriced laptops, I noticed the brand new Gateway LT3103u Netbook locked away in a cage.
A brief introduction about this machine – it is the first Netbook style machine sold by Gateway in the US, and is equipped with an AMD Athlon L110 64 bit, 1.2GHz processor. The version sold at Bestbuy comes with a 250GB hard drive and 2GB of ram.
As is often the case with Bestbuy, it took me longer to find a sales rep than it took for me to decide to buy this machine. I picked this machine for one simple reason – I am tired of the low resolution on most other Netbook size machines. HP was the only one offering a Netbook with a higher resolution screen, but when added to their Mini 2140, the price popped up to over $700.
The only other machine that was recently released that would fit my needs is the new 11.6″ Acer Aspire One AO751h, but its horribly slow Intel Atom processor made it unsuitable for anything more than some basic web work.
The Gateway LT3103u has the usual shiny plastic case, and even just pulling it out of the box covered the poor thing in my greasy fingerprints. The machine uses a low power AMD Athlon chip, capable of running 64 bit Windows, though as delivered, it comes with Vista Basic 32bit. What makes the LT3103u interesting is its dedicated ATI Radeon X1270 graphics chip. As sold by Bestbuy, the LT3103u comes with a 6 cell Lithium-Ion battery pack (which sticks out the back a little), 802.11b/g WiFi, a webcam and microphone in the screen bezel, 3 USB ports and an 11.6″ LED backlit display capable of 1366×768. The machine has a 3-in-1 card reader, a D-SUB VGA port, audio in/out and 10/100 Ethernet. There is no HDMI, no Bluetooth and no E-SATA as found on some high-end Netbooks.
As I mentioned earlier – it comes with Vista Basic, which also means it is ineligible for a free upgrade to Windows 7. Like with all Gateway machines, it comes with a supply of bloatware; Norton Internet Security Trial. Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office (trial), Google Desktop, Gateway Games, Windows Live, Money Essentials and a bunch of revenue generating icons on the desktop. I’ll be installing Windows 7 (64 bit) on it, so none of that bloat is going to bother me one bit.
The keyboard on the LT3103u is good – not great, but certainly a step above using the tiny keys on the first generation Asus Eee PC. There is a very small amount of flex on the keyboard. Keys are well spaced and you get a decent size space bar and dedicated arrow buttons.
The trackpad on the machine supports multi-gesture, and is wide enough for normal use. The 2 mouse buttons are under a single silver pad on the bottom, and its response is very good.
You’ll be happy to know that all parts of the machine can be easily accessed – the covers for ram, HDD and network card are all under user removable ports. The machine comes with a single 2GB Samsung module. The second MiniPCI slot does not have its port installed, but the open space means they might be planning a 3G enabled version (WWAN is specifically mentioned on the box as an option).
Performance is something I haven’t spent too much time looking at – but one of the first things I wanted to test was video playback. I’m pleased to report that this little machine had no problems at all with a 720p MKV file played back in full screen. For the fun of it, I also tried a 1080P file (also in MKV) though that really did not work well (no surprise there).
Update: after some playing around with the video playback settings, I can happily reply that the Gateway has zero issues with 1080p video! Files from the WMV HD showcase play in full screen without a single frame dropped or stutter. The MKV file I originally tried was encoded in 1980×1080, which is still a little too much for the machine, the WMV files are 1440×1080.
Booting from power-off to the Windows Vista login screen takes 53 seconds and a shutdown to power off takes 19 seconds.
There are one or two minor annoyances on the machine – there is a really annoying WiFi indicator located at the front of the machine, which flashes with all wireless activity. The hard drive is also quite noisy, and produces more clicking than I’d like to hear. Finally – there are 2 small rubber bumpers located on either side of the machine, these are quite annoying when you have your palms resting while typing.
Other than those minor issues, I’m surprisingly impressed with the Gateway LT3103u. Its performance is quite decent, the screen is crisp and bright, battery life should be good (Vista reports 6 hours on a full charge) and its specifications are not bad at all for its price.
At $399, it is a mere $20 more than the retail price of the Asus Eee PC 1000HE, which comes with 1GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive (though its battery and CPU are better).
Time (and a plane trip) will tell whether the LT3103u is a winner, and whether it really is the Netbook I’ve been looking for, but so far I’m quite impressed with what Gateway produced.
UPDATE: Windows 7 installed nicely, I posted my experience with the 2 minor driver issues here.