Gateway Tablet PC Review

Not Fast, But Pretty Fancy

Anyone accustomed to recent 2.0GHz notebooks will need to readjust to the M1200's performance -- especially on battery power, when Intel's SpeedStep technology slows the 866MHz Pentium III-M to just 400MHz. (Applications ran and responded smoothly enough, but it's been a while since we waited 25 seconds for a program to load, as we did with Corel's nifty Tablet PC drawing package, Grafigo.)

Plugged in for benchmark testing, the Tablet PC performed about as well as the 1.0GHz Pentium III laptops we reviewed in the summer of 2001 -- which means, if you want to be critical, that it's the slowest PC we've tested since then. The system puttered to a BAPCo SysMark 2002 Internet Content Creation score of 94, with Futuremark PCMark 2002 numbers of 2,729 (CPU), 1,596 (memory), and 499 (hard disk).

While we don't expect any Tablet PC to satisfy the 3D game fanatics, Microsoft does tout these things as able to be your primary PC, so we were hoping for something better than the i830MG graphics controller for desktop image (let alone video) editing sessions. Its 3DMark 2001 SE Pro score of 660 is more or less miserable, as is its 24 frames per second in the venerable Quake III Arena (High Quality 1,024 by 768 mode) benchmark.

Spare Parts

System setup is straightforward, though you may be daunted by the sheer number of pieces in the box -- the Gateway is the first computer we've seen, for instance, that comes with three AC adapters. One is for the slate; one is for the external AOpen 8X DVD-ROM and 24/10/24X CD-RW combo drive, which plugs into the FireWire port (and caused our only stumble during testing when we found the system can't boot from the FireWire drive; Gateway's e-mail tech support was no help, but a notice on Motion's support site says a BIOS upgrade is in the works).

The third is for the supplied FlexDock, a desktop base that duplicates the system's ports and connectors (modem and PC Card excepted) at its rear and adds a third USB port up front. A sliding stand lets the slate tilt back from vertical so you can still write on it while it's docked; in a clever feature, the docked system senses and switches between portrait and landscape mode if you swivel the LCD.

You can use the LCD, an external CRT monitor, or both at once, either as duplicates or a single, expanded display -- although since the pen only works on the LCD, you'll need to use the keyboard's touchpad to drag program windows from one screen to the other. The compact keyboard has a flat but comfortable layout and typing feel. All told, the FlexDock is too bulky and heavy to pack for travel, but certainly beats the provided, folding plastic easel that's an alternate way to prop the Tablet upright, but that gets in the way of connecting cables to its bottom. (The easel is holding the snap-on lid in the photo above.)

The Gateway bundle also includes a second, spare digitizer pen -- the special stylus required for a Tablet PC -- and a handful of spare points for the pens, plus a cleaning cloth for the LCD. InterVideo's WinDVD player and Ahead Software's Nero CD accompany the preinstalled Windows XP Tablet PC Edition; Microsoft Office XP Professional is a $300 option.

Skip To Page 1 Easy To Like, Not So Easy To Justify • 2 Not Fast, But Pretty Fancy 3 The Tablet PC Experience 4 The Write Stuff

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