Out of the Box

I swung by DigitalLife this afternoon and checked out the two big hardware introductions at the show, the Gateway One and the Palm Centro and came away with more favorable impressions. The Gateway One looks a bit like the iMac might have if Apple had continued with the polycarbonate gloss but made it black. It’s more wedge-like than the iMac’s thin “where’s the computer?” look, but may just be the best-looking desktop PC in the market. The multifunction power brick, by the way, is massive but, hey, so is the Xbox 360’s and you can’t plug a tanning lamp into it.

The Palm Centro looks better in black than red and the keyboard, while small, wasn’t that bad even under my large fingers, although part of that may be my greater experience with inferior keyboards in the past few years. I still don’t think the sub-$100 crowd will see a lot of the remaining value left in Palm OS as the consider the Centro versus Sidekicks, EnVs and slim Windows Mobile smartphones with QWERTY keyboards, but EV-DO is a nice plus and the integrated instant messaging looked nice from a cursory glance.

Share This

In looking at the Gateway One, CNet comes away saying the iMac is a better value based on the specs. For $150 less, you get a a faster Core 2 Duo processor (2.4 GHz vs. 2 GHz), higher resolution screen and Bluetooth as well as an integrated Webcam (although I don’t think it’s too fair to ding the Gateway One for its “easily lost” removable one). Gateway, however, ships with 50 percent more RAM (although the iMac RAM has a faster clock speed), a bigger hard drive, and comes bundled with an external ATSC/NTSC tuner. Then there are the other variables. For example, if you really want to run Vista on an iMac, that will cost you.

On the hardware side, though, Gateway has done an impressive job with the power brick for minimizing desktop clutter. I expect to see a lot of these boxes on reception desks. And, simply from the pictures, I think I like the look of the One better than the new iMac, but I hope to get a better look at it today at DigitalLife.

Share This