14 DAY TRIAL // The ultrathin market definitely seems to be booming lately. Until late last year, such products did not exactly appeal to many consumers, mostly because the hardware available for them at the time was too expensive. Soon after, Intel unleashed the Calpella mobile platform and, finally, there were mobile CPUs which, though pricier than other parts, had enough horsepower to offset this price premium. Later, Advanced Micro Devices also entered the race and, now, a veritable competition is finally shaping up.
As far as recent releases go, Micro-Star International can be said to have already covered the AMD flank, which means that the time is just ripe for Gateway to raise the stakes with the ID Series. This line of ultrathins utilizes Core i3 or Core i5 processors. It is currently made up of two models, which go by the names of ID49 and ID59 and have smooth aluminum enclosures and glowing aqua-blue touchpads.
Both the ID49 and the ID59 are equipped with an Ultrabright LED-backlit display whose panel sizes are of 14 inches and 15.6 inches, respectively. The native resolution is of 1366 x 768 pixels. As for the internal circuitry, the machines' configurations center around Intel Core i3 or Core i5 central processors, paired with up to 8GB of RAM and either the integrated GMA HD graphics or the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M (Optimus technology enabled). Furthermore, a hard disk drive provides up to 500GB of storage space.
Gateway managed to also cram, inside the less than 1-inch-thick enclosure, a DVD writer, a multi-card reader, Gigabit Ethernet, a 1.3 megapixel webcam and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi. Finally, the ID49 and ID59 have starting prices of $680 and $800, respectively, are pre-loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium and have already been added to their maker's official website, where interested users can go to obtain more information on the pair.