14 DAY TRIAL // Back in late June, Acer decided to have its subsidiary Gateway make all of its ultrathin laptops. Since then, the latter has been tirelessly making and releasing such mobile PCs, apparently determined to keep the inflow of ultraportables strong and steady. As such, that a new set of this type of notebooks would show up now may not come entirely as a surprise. In fact, Gateway has just finished announcing the NS Series of portable personal computers.
Being ultrathin notebooks, they sacrifice some of the overall performance, compared to high-end machines, in order to ensure a high level of portability. Nevertheless, the laptops still manage to pack a hard disk drive of up to 640GB or a SSD of up to 160GB, as well as a DVD writer and integrated graphics. To be more specific, the discrete NVIDIA GeForce 310M or 330M GPUs may be added, for a wider range of multimedia capabilities.
The NS line is currently composed of four models, namely the 11.6-inch NS10 , 13.3-inch NS30, 14-inch NS41 and 15.6-inch NS51. All of them have, at their heart, an Intel Calpella CPU, which can be either a Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7. They also use Ultrabright LED-backlit TFT LCD panels with a native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. Other specifications include a number of USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 3G, WiFi, a multi-in-1 card reader and Bluetooth 3.0. All of these parts are crammed inside packages weighing between 1.35 kg (11.6-inch ) and 2.47 kg (15.6-inch), even with a 6-cell battery pack.
All four of gateway's latest creations should become available sometime this month but, unfortunately, the exact date has not yet been revealed. The company also did not reveal what prices they will sport, although it did mention that they would all be backed by a one-year warranty.