Gateway Solo 3350 Deluxe
The Gateway Solo 3350 was yet another lightweight contender. It only weighed in at 1.677kg, making it the third lightest notebook. The Gateway 3350 features an Intel Pentium III 650 with 128MB of RAM, 4MB ATI Rage Graphics, and a 10GB hard disk drive. The casing is finished in silver. Even though it looks very square it actually looks quite attractive because of the colours that have been used. The keyboard was all one colour--there was no distinction made between the standard and function keys. The feel of the keys, however, was very good. They offered excellent feedback, and the large palmrest area on the notebook made it even more comfortable to type.
All the standard ports are on the back of the notebook. You will, however, find a port replicator connector on the base of the notebook. On the right-hand side of the notebook you'll find a single Type II PCMCIA port and on the left-hand side a USB port, headphone and microphone jack.
When we took a closer look at the base of the notebook we quickly found out that we could not do much there in reference to upgrading. You can only remove the hard drive from the base and the battery. The battery was rated at 11.1V 2800mAh. It spanned right across the whole width of the notebook and it had a handy battery life indicator.
We discovered that to access the system RAM you need to release the keyboard. To do this, first slide the panel that sits above the keyboard. There are four screws, which then have to be removed before you can pull up the keypad. Underneath the keypad we only found one single memory slot. This limits the overall memory capacity to only 256MB.
The Gateway has an external CD-ROM and floppy drive (it didn't ship with a DVD-ROM drive). The CD-ROM and floppy drive plug into an external drive connector located on the back of the notebook.
Sound quality was very poor. The speaker was positioned in the most unusual position: pointing down from the base of the notebook. Like the Mitac this Gateway notebook had a reset button, also located on the base of the notebook. If the system for some reason does not respond, you can press a straightened paper clip into the hole to shut down the system. In a system with no reset button, you are forced to turn off the power from the powerpoint and remove the battery from the notebook.
The display quality was very good. The greyscales were quite good and the pictures we used to test the display quality were sharp and bright and full of colour. The display was also very well supported. The Gateway, however, did not perform too well in any of our tests. In Content Creation Winstone it only scored 15.3 and 15.6 in Business Winstone. In BatteryMark it managed to just last over 90 minutes.
The Gateway is smaller than most of the other notebooks. There were, however, some smaller offerings and notebooks that packed a harder punch as well.
Gateway Solo 3350 Deluxe
Company:Gateway Australia
Ph:1300 302 952
Price:AU$4,299
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