Gateway EC1430u Review

Netbooks are great. They're light (under three pounds), low-priced ($300 to $400), handy traveling companions that are great for surfing the Web and checking e-mail and adequate for light productivity work.

But a lot of users dream of a netbook-plus: something with the speed and storage for more serious work, the muscle for multitasking, the oomph for image editing -- but not anything much bigger and heavier than a netbook, and certainly not something priced over $1,000 as fancy ultraportables are. A netbook on steroids, you might say. A notebook in netbook's clothing, so to speak. The Gateway EC1430u ($550), to be precise.

This glossy black member of what Gateway calls its EC14 series (there's a cherry red but otherwise identical model EC1437u) is slightly larger than most netbooks, measuring 8.0 by 11.2 by 1.2 inches and weighing 3.2 pounds. That's due to its 11.6- rather than the usual 10-inch display -- a 1,366 by 768-pixel panel with sunny LED backlighting.

Besides making room for 720p HD videos that won't fit into most netbooks' 1,024 by 600 resolution, the screen provides punchy colors and crisp text, although we found all but the top two or three brightness settings too dim for our taste. It's still small as far as the overall viewing experience goes (we don't start counting "real" laptop screens till we get to 13.3 inches), but it's sharp.
Also on the small side: the gesture-enabled touchpad, which has a pair of stiff chrome buttons beneath it. The keyboard, by contrast, is full-sized (in fact, the A through apostrophe keys span a fraction more than the usual desktop 8 inches), with a shallow but responsive typing feel. It has no layout quirks except for the common one of Home and End doubling up with the PgUp and PgDn keys.

The Myth of Fingerprints

The Gateway's glossy black plastic lid is handsome, but attracts plenty of smudges and fingerprints. It's accented by a silver strip with the company name and logo that attracts plenty of nicks and scratches.
On the system's left side are VGA and HDMI video outputs plus a USB 2.0 port. Two more USB ports are on the right, alongside Ethernet, headphone, and microphone connectors and an SD/xD/MMC/MS flash-card slot. There's a slide switch on the front edge with the Bluetooth logo, but our test unit did not have Bluetooth. The ultraportable would also be a natural for integrated 3G wireless, but it isn't available.
The operating system is the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 Home Premium, with preloaded software including the 60-day trial versions of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 and Norton Internet Security 2009. Gateway's consumer bloatware habit shows up in desktop icons for eBay, Netflix, and the WildTangent game service. Like other slimlines, the EC1430u does not have a built-in optical drive, but CyberLink's PowerDVD player is supplied anyway.


The CPU under the hood is Intel's Pentium SU4100, a 1.3GHz dual-core with 800MHz front-side bus and 2MB of Level 2 cache. It's teamed with 3GB of DDR2 memory and a 320GB, 5,400-rpm Hitachi hard disk -- in other words, double the cores, double the storage, and triple the memory of your average netbook.

That translates into benchmarks in which the EC1430u shows double to triple the performance of a netbook, though it trails true desktop-replacement-candidate thin-and-light laptops such as HP's $899 ProBook 5310m.

The system's PCMark Vantage score is 2,769; its 3DMark06 score, in another predictable showing for Intel's not-gaming-or-workstation-class GMA 4500MHD graphics, is a sluggish 527. But it rendered Cinebench R10's sample scene in five minutes (score 2,949), compared to the approximately 17 minutes of most netbooks, and it felt satisfactorily snappy as we switched among Word and Excel documents, an image-editing program, and Web videos.

Built To Last

Happily, the Gateway performed more like a netbook than a notebook when it came to battery life. We never saw the eight hours touted on a sticker on our test unit's screen bezel, but we managed six hours of unplugged operation despite fairly heavy hard-drive access including a system restore and a multimedia slide show.

Percentage-wise, the jump from a netbook's $400 to the Gateway's $550 price is a big one, but we don't think $150 extra is too much to pay for the extra performance and real-computer credentials of the EC1430u. (We think it would be an absolute killer at $499, though.)

And if someone asks you, "Is that one of those netbooks?" You can smile and say, "Why, yes. Yes it is."

HardwareCentral Intelligence

Gateway EC1430u Gateway $550 Available: Now On a 5-star scale: Features: Performance: Value: Total: 11 out of 15