First Widescreen Notebook Under $1000

Gateway announced its retail family of eMachines widescreen notebooks for spring 2004, from high-performance wireless systems to the first widescreen notebook under $1000. The eMachines line of products is the only major PC brand that offers the Mobile AMD Athlon 64 processor—in the M6805 and M6809 wireless widescreen notebook PCs—delivering a high-performance display for DVD movies, games, digital photography, and other 32-bit multimedia applications. Both notebooks also include the ATI Mobility RADEON 9600 graphics processor. The M6805 costs $1399, and the M6809 costs $1549 (both after $100 mail-in rebate). In its M6410 and M2105 machines, Gateway is also introducing eMachines wireless widescreen notebooks that use the Intel Pentium 4 processor. The M6410 costs $1299, and the M2105 costs $999 (both after $100 mail-in rebate). The M2105 is the first widescreen notebook priced under $1000.

All eMachines notebooks feature the widescreen format display with a 16:10 aspect ratio that permits as much as 30 percent more DVD viewing area than a standard 15" notebook screen. The top three notebooks in the eMachines line—the M6410, M6805, and M6809—incorporate Broadcom's 54g wireless chipset, providing as much as five times the performance of 802.11b while maintaining compatibility with other wireless devices on the market. These notebooks also feature 512MB of DDR memory.

The eMachines family of notebooks are 1.6" thin, weigh 7.5 pounds, and include an 8-cell lithium ion battery that offers approximately 2.5 hours of battery life, depending on configuration and applications. With the ATI Mobility RADEON 9600 video card, the M6805 and M6809 64-bit notebooks support Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 application programming interface, offering cinematic visual quality for gaming and other graphics-intensive applications. The 64-bit notebooks also feature a "6-in-1 Media Reader" for quick downloading, editing, and sharing of digital, audio, and video files. The media reader supports Compact Flash (CF), Micro Drive, MultiMedia Card, Secure Digital, Memory Stick, and Memory Stick Pro storage formats.