Gateway ID58

Full Review

One of the most well-known American tech brands, Gateway, is now in India. What it means for you and me is the choice to consider a world-class product, like the Gateway ID58 laptop, which combines good looks and stylish design. A metallic shade of blue adorns the entire laptop, glossy on the screen cover and brushed metallic finish on the rest of the body. The entire frame of the Gateway ID58 has chrome-plated accents running along its side, both on the chassis and the screen, and it looks really cool.

The 15.6-inch widescreen display, capable of 1366x768 resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio, is glossy in nature, and has average viewing angles at best. There’s a 1.3-megapixel camera grooved into the top screen bezel, and Gateway has very thoughtfully given it a sliding lens cover. The screen lid and the rest of the chassis melds together aesthetically at the hinge, enveloped by a prominent silver curve, which also houses the onboard speakers underneath; the sound from these speakers is good but not great. There’s a row of touch-sensitive buttons just below the speaker for adjusting volume and power plans.

The Gateway ID58’s keyboard, nestled below the touch-sensitive strip, is one of the best we’ve seen in a while. The keys are prominent, well defined, and have a smooth metallic finish on them. And props to Gateway for including a number pad on the right—you can’t say that about many laptops of similar size. The Gateway ID58 doesn’t just have good looks, but its innards aren’t too bad either. At the center of its processing hub is an Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 2-GHz processor, a popular choice amongst mainstream laptops these days. Along with that you get 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and a slot-loading DVD writer.

The ID58 doesn’t miss out on essentials like Gigabit Ethernet, Draft-N Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth connectivity options. It has four USB ports, multicard reader, and the added bonus of HDMI and eSATA ports. The ID58 comes with a Windows Vista Home Premium operating system—ideal for its intended usage, which is mainly entertainment, and that odd sprinkle of gaming.

The Gateway ID58 isn’t a sluggard by any stretch of imagination, giving a respectable performance for its hardware configuration. A WorldBench 6 score of 85 is pretty good, so is a 3D Mark 06 score of 2222, and PC Mark Vantage score of 3137. Gaming performance was in line with the ID58’s GPU, an Nvidia GeForce G105M, but don’t expect too much. Remember, multimedia and HD-playback is this laptop’s forte, and it vindicated its claim in our HD tests. Both 1080p and 720p files played without a hitch, and no complaints here. Battery life of 2 hours 40 minutes is good, too. In terms of performance, it's a very well-balanced mainstream laptop.

Bottom Line

The Gateway ID58 has several things going for it: looks, design, and performance. It is certainly a worthy contender for a proper mainstream laptop, but at Rs. 49,990, it's overpriced compared to some others in our Top 5. If you’re interested in one of these, they’re available only at Croma stores across the country.