Gateway sheds weight from powerful high-end notebook

Gateway launched two new notebooks Thursday, slimming down its most powerful notebook and adding a widescreen display to a less-expensive unit, the company said in a release.

The skinnier notebook is the M680, which is touted as a mobile workstation, with a 17-inch widescreen display and Intel’s new Alviso chipset. Alviso adds support for DDR2 (double data rate 2) memory and the PCI Express interconnect technology, which help to improve overall system performance.

It will replace the M675, which was one of Gateway’s most prominent notebooks, said Kelly Odle, a company spokeswoman. While the M675 was designed as a business notebook, shipments of the notebook were almost evenly split between professionals looking for performance and home users in search of a multimedia notebook, she said.

At 8.8 pounds (4 kilograms), however, the M675 just barely qualified as a portable PC. Gateway shaved a little more than a pound off the M680, down to a more manageable 7.7 pounds. This is still not a notebook for a business traveler or home user on the go, but users will notice the difference when they move it, Odle said.

Like its predecessor, the M680 comes with a 17-inch widescreen display. The extra screen width makes for a more enjoyable movie-watching experience, and also helps a professional user view more of a spreadsheet, Gateway said.

The M680 is available in a variety of configurations. At $1,399, the base model M680S comes with Intel’s Pentium M 730 processor, 512M bytes of DDR2 memory, a 40GB hard drive, a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, a Mobility Radeon x700 graphics card from ATI Technologies Inc. with 64MB of video memory and Intel’s Pro/Wireless 802.11b/g wireless networking chip. Both preconfigured and configurable models are available on Gateway’s Web site.

The Irvine, California, company’s other new system is the M360, billed as a thin-and-light business notebook. It is also available with the Alviso chipset and a 15.4-inch widescreen display.

The M360 weighs six pounds, putting it at the high end of what most PC analysts consider a thin-and-light notebook. The term has more to do with marketing than technology, but notebooks weighing around five pounds are generally considered thin-and-light systems. Ultraportable notebooks, such as Dell’s Latitude X1 that was unveiled on Wednesday, usually weigh around three or four pounds, while desktop replacement systems like the M680 check in at around 7 pounds or more.

Several different versions of the M360 are also available Thursday on Gateway’s Web site. The least expensive version, the M360S, costs $849 with Intel’s Celeron M 350 processor, which offers much less performance than the Pentium M. That notebook also features 512M bytes of DDR2 memory, a 40G-byte hard drive, a CD-ROM optical drive and a 802.11g wireless networking chip from Broadcom.