Hello and welcome to another AIC video!
As always I am ever in search of new laptops under $250. I often find A LOT of value in these systems for new users, as they offer a lot of punch for the money.
Today on the table is a $200 gateway from walmart. It has a stupid model name – the GWTC116-2BL. . It’s the 11.6” touch screen model. Growing up, gateway was a whole brand that had dedicated stores, focused on low cost consumer friendly models. Plenty of people I knew had gateways in their home, but it started to struggle, and was bought out by acer computers, who quietly ended the brand nearly a decade ago. In the last year though it was brought back and is being sold as a walmart exclusive brand. From what I can tell, the computers are being made by acer.
Why Gateway? It’s a trusted name, and the name is already owned and controlled by acer, so all they had to do was spin up some specific models, and the branding was already to go.
Now, I’m going to mention…. The box. I’ve had people complain about me talking about the packaging of a system before, but it’s a very important part of marketing and initial customer experience with a machine. And here we have the iconic cow spots. The box is pretty sturdy and has nice dense foam holding the quite light system and charger. Documentation is pretty minimal, but in today’s day and age… computer’s don’t really need a users manual.
Inside the box we find this very attractive blue 360 hinge notebook.
It has a 11.6” 1366×768 display, Celeron n4020cpu, windows 11 in s mode, 64gb of emmc storage, and 4 gigs of ram. Very standard stuff for this class of laptop, So standard, it matches exactly with this Asus L210m (a much better name, thank you asus). Why these specs? Simple answer; windows licensing. Just like netbooks of yor, windows basically gives manufacturers windows for free on these systems. The goal being, that in S mode, you are limited to installing apps from the windows store, you’re limited to the edge browser. Why? Because windows is hoping to make up the costs long term on the back end app purchases in the web store, or adds in edge/free apps. You get a year of office 365 for free, why? So after a year you’ll pay the monthly/yearly subscription fee. You can switch out of S mode pretty easily and for free. But you’re still limited on what this system can run.
And what can this system run? Well….. Not a ton. That Celeron N4020 is getting pretty old, I first reviewed it well over a year ago, and it seems to be the main Intel CPU available on sub $300 notebooks. The problem with that, is that AMD has given us the 3020e, which crushes this cpu on every level, up and including graphics, and can be had in laptops that don’t cost much more. Once you go above that $300 mark, you start to be able to get newer used computers with 8th gen core i5 processors… and buying a new cheap computer stops making sense.
What about the rest of this computer?
To start off with, this shipped with windows 10s, and out of the box it offered to upgrade me to windows 11, and so I did. That was a mistake. Windows 10 was a great upgrade to windows 7. Skipping window 8 entirely… 8.1 was not bad, but not good enough to stay installed on any of my systems as soon as 10 was available. But 10 always seemed…. Half baked. Good, but coud have stood a bit longer in the oven. 11? I will keep 10 and hope that 12 fixes everything. I won’t go too deep into it, since this is a laptop review and not an OS review, but it doesn’t bring anything to the table with this laptop and if anything makes it harder to use. So if you buy this and it still has windows 10, keep it on windows 10.
The screen on this computer is actually pretty good. It’s a touch screen with the big glass on the front, so… plenty of glare, but it’s bright, clear with really good viewing angles. It seems like this is an area where all computers have done quite a bit of improving the last couple of years. I haven’t come across a “bad” screen in quite a while that made the use of that system unacceptable.
The hinge for the 360 is nice and tight. So you can have it flat, or like a tent or all the way over into “tablet mode” and not worry about it sliding or falling down. But it does take two hands to open it and to fold it over. And when in tablet mode it doesn’t sit flush against the bottom. So it bounces/ taps the two halves together as you tap on the screen. It gets annoying quickly.
Because the of the big glass screen the screen half of the laptop is quite heavy, so if you lean the screen back very far, it gets pretty floppy, this is not great for using in your lap or if you’re trying to angle the screen to avoid glare. It doesn’t give a very confident feeling when typing, almost like I Have to hold the system down with my palms as I type
As far as typing, that too is an interesting experience. This keyboard is… not good. The key caps feel like they are thin pieces of plastic. No substance to them at all, like just barely a crust over the rubber domes. At the same time, they offer no resistance, but you can also feel the resistance of the domes? It’s not much better than if I had to type using the domes themselves. And it has some weird key placements like the delete key being where the backslash would normally be, and the backslash being down where a control key would be, and the up and down arrows are my least favorite, tiny up and down with massive right and left.
Similar story for the touchpad. It’s on the smaller side, and is cheap and hollow feeling. Just putting your finger on it, without enough force to actually click, it sounds like you are clicking as there is slack between where the touchpad naturally rests and the click it engages. It does have full multi touch functionality, I just don’t want to touch it.
The touch screen is accurate, and easy to use. I’ve had some touch screens that were frustrating, but this has just enough bezel I don’t accidentally touch the screen, but no so much that the screen to overall size is silly. I’ve had some that have had like a 3/4” bezel all around.
Battery life is also a big plus on this, it has a huge battery and in testing I regularly got 10+ hours out of it…. The problem is, they included such a wimpy charger, it takes nearly that long to charge the sucker! Charging it was always an over night deal and not a “oh hey, I’m running low, let me plug it in for 30 minutes and get enough juice to last me the rest of the day”.
Now as I’ve been using this for the last week or so, to work on this review. It has felt…. Extra slow. I have my L210m, which has basically the same hardware, but it feels… faster. I don’t know if that’s just a windows 10 vs 11 thing, or if there was something with the hardware, so bench mark results show us… that yup, everything is just a bit slower on this system than on my L210m with the same hardware. Only 2-5%, but that absolutely does make a difference.
Another area on this laptop that makes the experience feel slower is the Wifi only connects to my 2.4ghz network and not my 5ghz network and i can FEEL it. My 2.4 network is loaded down with all my IoT devices, so anything on there feels the pain.
Ports on this laptop are… confusing.There are some standards, Headphone, micro sd, One usb 2.0, one usb 3.0, but no usb type C, and the HDMI port is… a mini hdmi… why? I guess I get ditching a type c port, saving pennies, but is a mini HDMI that much cheaper? The bezel is wide enough to accomodate one from the looks of it, or just don’t include one at all? Or include a type c that supports display port? if you’re going to require somebody to have a dongle anyways, and need it to be smaller, but maybe the cost there was too high? I don’t know what it takes to add that support to a system, but it sure would be far more useful than this.
And being that it’s a tablet, the power button is here on the side. I wish they had also included a volume rocker. That’s something I’ve had on other folding laptops and it an appreciated addition, absent i’m sure because of cost savings.
And cost cutting is what you get with this laptop. At $200, it just isn’t enough to convince me to buy it over a used business class laptop with a 5th or 6th gen core processor. If you had to buy new, $30 more dollars gets you nearly the same hardware, with an upgradeable storage slot, which negates one of the biggest limitations of these budget systems.. You lose the touchscreen and folding, but overall get a much better user experience. And $40-50 more gets you one with the AMD 3020e which is faster than the n4020 by nearly 40%.
I’ll put a link to the L210m in the description. If you’re looking for a super budget system, that’s the one I would buy today, that is available, and a link to systems with the 3020e.