A few years back, during a financial crunch, I briefly considered buying a Gateway laptop. An office techie talked me out of it, though, remarking that the company was in its death throes. That was right before Gateway tried to reinvent itself as a vendor of budget plasma TVs, and a few years before the eMachines merger.
Well, Gateway’s still kicking as the Y2K5 approaches, as evidenced by today’s release of the M210 notebook. The 5.2-pounder has a pretty sick spec sheet for the money: The best configuration features a 1.6GHz Pentium M with Centrino, 512MB of RAM, and a 60-gig hard drive, all for a penny shy of $1,300. The real question, of course, is whether the M210 can survive rough days on the road. The latches on my pal’s M675CS fell off, like, 3 days after the (terrible) warranty expired.
The M210:Sleek and Slim With a Widescreen [Press release]
