Gateway

The strange and inglorious history of tech boutique retailers

Last year, nearly as many people visited Apple's retail stores as went to Disneyland parks. That's something to marvel considering Disney has been in the amusement park business since 1955, and Apple's gadget stores are barely 12 years old. Apple's stores are also light on the cotton candy, fireworks, and bathrooms.

While there are plenty more differences between the two, one major similarity is that both companies have relied on these institutions as the ideal experience for interacting with their products.

In that same vein comes Samsung's latest foray into the retail business. Today, the company announced plans … Read more

Giant killer: ALO's tiny Pan Am headphone amplifier

Frankly, I was a little disappointed when I first unboxed the new ALO Pan Am tube headphone amp. It looked so cute and tiny; how could it possibly deliver the goods? The dainty 4.6-inch-by-3.8-inch footprint makes it easy to place anywhere. The amp's rear end houses three inputs: stereo RCA and 3.5mm analog inputs and a USB connection. The built-in digital-to-analog converter accommodates up to 24-bit/96-kHz audio. The amp is available in anodized silver or black finishes.

I started listening with my trusty Grado RS-1 headphones and loved the clarity. The Pan Am has the … Read more

Motorola Home Gateway puts your entire home in the cloud, almost

LAS VEGAS--You may never really be away from home again.

Motorola demoed today at CES 2012 its Home Gateway, a device about the size of a compact router, designed to bridge all appliances of your home, from IP cameras to TVs to light bulbs, and allow you to monitor and manage them over the Internet with a mobile app.

During the demo, Motorola showed how a person could control different devices, like switching desk lights on and off or dimming them, or viewing surveillance camera footage, all in a single mobile app.

Motorola said the Home Gateway is the latest in its 4Home series of technology that "delivers the connected home in a smart and simple way." Most of the devices can be paired with the Home Gateway via a single button push. Devices that don't support any connectivity standard, such as an old refrigerator, can be added to the network via a Z-Wave adapter and then the user can monitor their energy usage and even turn them on or off.… Read more

Best Buy chimes in with MacBook, laptop deals

Best Buy is doing its part to make MacBooks more affordable--and also offering decent deals on Windows laptops.

11.6-inch MacBook Air: In the shadow of Apple's Black Friday deals, Best Buy is striving to stand out with better deals. And it's succeeding in some cases. For instance, the retailer is selling the 11.6-inch MacBook Air with an Intel Core i5 chip, 2GB Memory, and 64GB solid-state drive (model: MC968LL/A) for $849--that's about $50 less than Apple's Black Friday $898 sale price. (And note that MacMall has been selling a 2010 11.6-inch MacBook Air for $799.)… Read more

Acer offers up new all-in-one desktops for the holidays

Acer announced a variety of new desktops today for consumers and business buyers. Among the highlights are two new all-in-ones, each for under $1,000.

The Acer-branded AZ5 is Acer's new flagship all-in-one. Starting at $750, the 23-inch AZ5 will feature second-generation Intel Core i3- and Core i5-series CPUs, along with a touch screen and Acer's Clear.fi media-streaming software.

Although this is a touch-screen-based desktop, the AZ5, in keeping with Acer's older all-in-ones, doesn't seem to offer an equivalent to HP's well-conceived touch software suite. At least the overall design of the AZ5 has … Read more

Rounding up the latest 14-inch laptops

This may come as a surprise, but laptop shoppers don't always take our advice to heart. For example, we've strongly suggested that people in the market for a midsize laptop (generally one with a 14-, 15-, or 16-inch display) focus their attention on the 14-inch end of that spectrum rather than the more common 15-inch size.

Why? Sure, you're trading away a little bit of screen size (though usually not any screen resolution), but 14-inch midsize laptops offer better overall industrial design, largely because the standard laptop keyboard fits much better in a 14-inch chassis than a 15-inch one, leaving much less dead space on either side.

But despite our protestations, 15-inch models still outsell 14-inch ones, even though they're significantly less portable in most cases. So if you're in the market for a midsize laptop, and want to shave off a little size and weight while keeping the same CPU power and screen resolution, check out our handy list of recent 14-inch laptops below.

The worst-sounding audio product

I've heard a lot of really bad-sounding audio products over the years, but most of them were so awful they suffered a natural and well-deserved "death." Take for example the $499 Gateway KAS-103 home theater in a box system that debuted in 2003. I had the "pleasure" of reviewing this attractive system, but it sounded so bad I was duty bound to try another sample, which was equally dreadful. There was absolutely no blend between the sound of the subwoofer and the tiny satellite speakers, the high levels of background static were impossible to ignore, … Read more

Gateway ID47H02u reviewed: Surprisingly stylish $699 14-inch laptop

Gateway laptops are funny products. Of the two mainstream lines available, the "budget" NV series and the "higher-end" ID series, neither one currently has a single model that tops $699. So, in that sense, both are budget lines. The Gateway ID is the slicker, more polished-looking product and a significantly thinner laptop with a 14-inch display, more closely matching what most people consider to be easily portable.

The $699 Gateway ID47H02u has a good set of specs for its price. An Intel Core i5-2410M processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive are considered mainstream specs nowadays, but no corners are cut on the processor, which matches equivalent $1,000-range laptops such as the Toshiba Satellite E305 and the Toshiba Portege R835. A sleek--for Gateway--design, a comfortable keyboard and touch pad, and a long-lasting battery complete the package. It's definitely a more attractive and slimmer notebook overall than you see in the Gateway NV line, which we recently reviewed in the form of the Gateway NV55S05u.… Read more

Gateway NV55S05u reviewed: Budget laptop, AMD A8 processor

The landscape of budget laptops often looks like a police lineup of suspects: a muddy confusion of similar-looking faces and bodies. For $600 you can buy a lot of computer lately, though you're not likely to get something that's particularly sexy.

The $629 Gateway NV55S05u is one of more than a dozen 15-inch Gateway NV laptops with a galaxy of different processors. In the case of our 15.6-incher, an AMD A8-3500M APU is inside. AMD's A8 processor is part of a new line of AMD Fusion processors with graphics and CPU on one chip (called an … Read more

Gateway updates NV and ID laptop lines with new looks, updated CPUs

Far from being subsumed into the global Acer brand, Gateway continues to churn out new laptops, including a few fairly sharp-looking models. Today, Gateway has updated its NV and ID laptop lines with new looks and new features.

The thin Gateway ID47 manages to fit a 14-inch display into a chassis closer to the size of a 13-inch laptop. The minimalist, nearly monochrome design has a brushed-metal look to the flat lid, which Gateway calls "Brushed Platinum." An alternate design, called "Infinity Blue Liquid," is also available.

The ID47 has a large clickpad-style touch pad, a change from the previous generation, as well as edge-to-edge glass over the display and a USB 3.0 port that also offers a sleep-and-charge mode for powering accessories while the laptop is turned off or sleeping.

Under the hood, the biggest change is the addition of second-generation Intel Core i-series processors--pretty much a must-have for any new laptop halfway through 2011. Some versions of the ID will include discrete Nvidia graphics. … Read more