Gateway 14.1" Ultra Slim Notebook -- REVIEW

A Gateway notebook? Is it any good? Let's check it out

Dave Taylor here and I'm checking out this. Believe it or not, this is the Gateway 14.1-inch ultra-slim notebook

Why do I say, believe it or not? Because Gateway is one of the oldest brands in the PC industry, and they went away for a really long time

But I remember back in the day having a Gateway Tower PC and Gateway, of course, was characterized by the cow black and white pattern

Well, there's not much of that pattern left. There's a little bit on the box, but not very much

So let's actually put the box aside and let's have a look at this computer itself

So this is actually pretty sweet. They've done a pretty nice job

Now, what happened was Acer bought the gateway license, and then Acer has licensed its gateway intellectual property to another company

So this computer is either made by a company called GPU, or there's rumors that it's made by a company called EVOO

Either way, I just look at it as a standalone computer, and there's a lot to like here

There are some issues, but there's a lot to like. So first off, let me spin it around so you can see this is actually a very credible 14.1 inch

This is an LCD IPS display running at 1920 by 1080. So this is the same resolution as your HD TV

Now, if you have a 4K TV, then you have much higher resolution

This is an HD. So really high-end, fancy laptops and computers that are, you know, two, four, eight times the price of this

They have much higher resolution, but this is entirely functional. And imagine watching TV, what just happened here, turned off

So imagine watching TV on something this small. So yeah, it's going to be dense

It's going to have a really good, bright, crisp display. One neat thing is it has a fingerprint sensor on the touchpad

So I can actually log in just by touching it. Very modern, right

And it's powered by an Intel I5 running at one gigahertz, but it can peak at 3.6 gigahertz theoretically

It is a multi-core, 16 gig of RAM. It's a 256 gig SSD drive, so the drive's actually pretty darn fast

The audio, interestingly, is tuned by THX. Now, THX is the same company that gives you that big, beautiful audio sound in movie theaters

So we'll come back to that tuned by THX, because it's kind of really cool and kind of really

bit of a misrepresentation, perhaps. We'll come back. Bluetooth 5.1, so it's almost the very latest generation of Bluetooth, which is great if you're

going to use any Bluetooth peripherals like wireless headphones. The fingerprint scanner, I already said, I hooked it up with Windows Hello. That's how I got

it to log me in. Super easy. The forward webcam is one megapixel, which is not much

Modern smartphones are two, four, even eight megapixel forward webcams, but this is certainly

enough to work with Microsoft meetings or Skype or Zoom. And we'll come back. I think one of the

great use cases for this is for a student who is suddenly stuck working at home because they can't

go to school or a second computer for your spouse or something. Okay. It has a bunch of ports

Let me give you a quick tour of the different ports and then we'll actually try one out. So

on, let me just sort of spin things around. On the right hand side, you have microSD

the headphone or 3.5 millimeter jack and USB 3.0 and then on the left side you

have the Kensington lock which is helpful if you want to get a bunch of these

for a computer lab or an internet cafe you can lock them all down and then the atypical power plug we come back to that in a second USB3 HDMI and USBC So I think the addition of the USBC is pretty interesting

Now, I have an HDMI cord. Let me grab it because since it supports H-DMI, I thought, all right

well, let's plug in an H-D-Mi monitor. And ironically, that's an ACER monitor. So Acer owns the Gateway

brand. So I'm going to start up our computer again and looks like I'll probably have to log in again

Let's see what happens here. And everything I'm doing here, let's get this to plug in, everything

I'm doing here should be mirrored there. Let's see what happens. There you go. So now you can

watch me log in. And now that's actually pretty slick, right? So having shown this and it comes

with Windows 10 home, let me just talk of just for a minute. I'm going to just close this a little bit

is the power. It's a really nice power adapter and the prongs pop out and everything. It looks more

like something that would come with a smartphone than with a laptop. Thank goodness we're getting

away from those chunky clunker bricks. But I'm going to give them points off for this unique and

atypical power plug because this means if you lose this, you have to buy another one from the same

company. And that's a hassle. I really, really wish they would have used the USBC for charging

maybe have two USBCs, or some other connection that's more standard that would give you the

ability to use another or third-party charger in case something happens to this or you lose it

or you just want to have one in the office and one at home. So that's a bit of a drag

Now, having said all of that, it's all well and good to show you the physical characteristics of the

computer but I really want to show you how it works too however before we get there

let me give you a quick close-up of the keyboard layout because that's really

important to people and I find that it's a really nice comfortable keyboard and

the keys have a nice travel distance so it's easy and quick to type on I

had no issues with precision I type pretty fast and it kept up so now let's switch

to actually seeing what's on the display so I'm gonna start by opening the

start menu and we'll go down let's find some app we can launch and hmm why don't we go ahead and open up

the Microsoft store and you can see it loaded pretty darn fast but let's launch something else let's

actually go and look through the files real quick because again this is an SSD so accessing the

file system is pretty darn zippy right and that's all good you can see we have the Nova bench

and the CPU Z, and I also ran CineBench. So actually, let's pause for a second

and let me show you the NovaBench scores, and then let me show you the Cinebench scores

What this points to is it points to a computer that doesn't have a super fast CPU

and doesn't have a super fast graphics processor, but let's go back to the demo now

and you'll see it's still pretty, darn functional. So, we're back. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually launch

another tester, but this actually CPUZ is more about giving you a profile for what your computer

has installed. And we'll let it start up. And so here you can see, I'm going to pause again

And you can see that it is an Intel Core I-5. It's the Ice Lake chip model. I don't know

all of Intel's thousands of chip names, but that's something some people will find interesting

And you can see the clock speed is 1.5 gigahertz or 1,596 megahertz

And lots of data you can extract from this. But let's go back and keep moving on our demo

So we close that And let just go ahead and open up a web browser And again notice how speedy everything is This is actually quite a functional PC here

And if we go to YouTube, assuming I don't type the domain in wrong, here we are on YouTube

And we can go down and you know everything scrolls. YouTube has 300 pop-ups

Sorry about that. And if we go to a video, see we can find one

that looks reasonably interesting. Yeah, we could try this NFL one. And here's more pop-ups

We don't want that. We'll skip the ad. We'll skip the premium YouTube opportunity

And so now you can see the video is doing just fine

This actually does a really nice job with everything that you really would want to do on your PC

I hope that demo was really helpful. It actually is really fun to try to run it through its paces and see how different things

work. And in terms of this performance benchmarks, you know, you have to know what the comparables are. So

if you're going to compare these numbers to other computers, make sure they're in the same price

range. Because there's no question. You can drop a lot more money and get a lot faster computer

That's just like saying you can spend more money and get a faster car, right? Now, one thing I really

want to highlight, which really startled me, it's one of the first PCs have had like this

for a while. There's no touchscreen. It is not a touchscreen. So, you know, you know

you can't use the screen itself for input. You are using your track pad and the taps and the clicks

So that's kind of a funky design. That might be something that is going to be an issue for you

You definitely want to know that when you take it out of the box and you start tapping the screen

and nothing happens because there's no sensor. It's also the case that as far as I can tell, the microphone is like down here

And what that means, and you even heard it in that video is that every click and tap is

big, loud, and thunky. And that's just kind of a mediocre design. What a lot of computers do is

they put the microphone higher up so that you don't hear gajong if you push the track pad or something

So that's, again, something worth knowing. When I tried this for a multi-user gaming setup

then I could tell who else was on the call and was actually using a computer where their microphone

was near the keyboard because you could hear chunk, junk, junk, junk, junk

as they were typing. And it was disconcerting. It was like, hmm, if I use

this a lot, I'd probably get some sort of external microphone or something. You can pick those

up, honestly, for like $10. It's really inexpensive. It's something that plugs into USB 3 and it's on a little

stand and it's going to sound 100 times better anyway. So there's that as a solution

Now, let's talk about the audio. So as you saw in the keyboard

close up, this appears, that this is a nice long track with a bunch of speaker in it, right? Or multiple speakers

So here's the harsh reality. The built-in speakers suck. They're really pretty awful

There's no mid-range. There's no base. It's a very tinny high. It is really a worst-case scenario

You'll use it because you just don't have an option. But what about that tuned by THX

So that comes into play when you plug in headphones to the AUX jack

And I was blown away. I am not kidding. I used some pretty nice headphones. I think I had the biodynamics. And it was just amazing. It was such a full rich and just a big sound stage. I mean, yeah, they're good headphones, but this did a really good job of converting its audio signal. I was just listening to Spotify, but giving a really good signal to the headphones. And frankly, I was startled. It was just like, well

you know after listening to this crappy little speaker I like you know I don know what the THX thing is but maybe that a little misrepresentation And then I plugged in the headphones and I like holy cow They really sound nice It really has a beautiful sound if you just don rely on the built speakers

So that's the THX piece of it. And it actually is pretty cool and it does work

So that's good to know. Now, let me give you a couple of specs

It's 13 inches by 9 inches by 8 tenths of an inch thick

It is 3.5 pounds. So it's certainly portable enough for, little Jane or Johnny to take to school at some point or put in their backpack. This is, as I said

Gateway has been licensed by Acer. So the Gateway line actually starts at $179. They have a two for one

I'm sorry, a two in one. Two for one is a different deal. A two and one for $199. This is in their

midrange at about $500. We'll come back to the price in a minute. And then the top end of the

entire gateway line through Walmart exclusively is 999 and that's a 15.6 inch laptop. I'm guessing that

has better performance all the way around. It's obviously going to be bigger and a bigger screen

But this is actually a pretty nice package. So what's the use case for this? I will say I think

this would be a great laptop if you have a child who is at home currently doing online schooling

right it's going to work with zoom it has enough graphics power that they can play some games if they

really want to uh definitely has enough screen and power to be able to work with any of the microsoft

suite or google suite or you know Microsoft online they can you know do zoom or Skype or Microsoft meetings

this is an entirely capable computer if you need a second computer because they have one in

your family and you just need an additional screen occasionally this could work

for that. As you saw, you can also hook it up to an external screen. That could be a 50-inch TV

and it would also look nice. So, you know, there's lots of different ways you can use this

If you are a power user or you were like, you know, 20 years old and hardcore into gaming

and have this amazing home gaming setup and you want something for while you're on the road

it probably isn't your computer. This just doesn't have the GPU or graphics performance

and it certainly doesn't have the CPU to really drive. rich, complicated games, but outside of the gaming community, most of us use fairly light resources

on our computers, and that's where this really shines. So, let's talk about the price

But before we get to the price, let me ask if you can subscribe to my channel. I really appreciate

when you do that. It's just a tap or a click on that little red subscribe button on the lower right

Easy, right? Cool. Now, this is the Gateway 14.1 inch ultra-slim notebook

It comes in this gorgeous blue. I really like this blue. And this is a metallic blue. This is not plastic, by the way. So it comes in blue or black or green or rose gold. The rose gold looks pretty sweet too. But I think this is the winning color of all four. And it is in fact the only one that's out of stock at walmart.com. So it is $479 or you can finance it through walmart.com for $45 a month times 12 months. That does translate to a 20% APR. So, compared to you

pair that with your credit card APR, because it might be cheaper to just buy it on your credit

card and pay it off over some period of months. Either way, you can learn more about it and the whole

lineup at walmart.com slash gateway. And as for me, I'm pretty impressed. I think I'm going to go

back to listening to some Spotify on my headphones and really just enjoying that THX audio. So

with that, I'll catch you in my next video