Product Reviews

There may be a lot of fancy, slimline styling going on in the ultra-portable world, but as Gateway has proved with the Solo 9500 XL, there's still a substantial market for the larger, bulkier desktop replacements. These not only pack a lot of power and features into a single unit, but also give you a larger screen area - a substantial 15.7in TFT in the Gateway's case.

In fact, the Gateway's screen is so large that an extra lip has been added below the glide pad to accommodate it. The lip also features the LED power and battery indicators, but unfortunately looks and feels like it was stuck on at the last minute. It also lengthens the palm rests, meaning your wrist is right on the edge when you're typing, making it uncomfortable to type on for longer than a few minutes. However, the keyboard itself is well designed, with separate cursor keys and, with the exception of the half-height Enter key, the keys are also sensibly sized.

Unfortunately our concerns with the build quality extended to the plastic lid. Pressing the back caused ripples in the screen too easily, meaning that the screen won't have a lot of protection when travelling.

Instead of opting for a high-resolution UXGA screen like the Dell Inspiron 8000 1000UT (reviewed issue 79, p172), the 9500 has a native SXGA resolution. This is reproduced sharply enough, although the lighting is uneven and uncomfortably dark to look at, even with the brightness up full. This made it difficult to find a viewing angle without a dark shadow across the top, comparing unfavourably to the Panrix Vision 800's bright and evenly lit 15in TFT (reviewed p149). The Dell also copes well with downscaling at lower resolutions, which the Gateway has trouble with. You can't drop down to 1,024 x 768 for more comfortable viewing, as the chunky and misaligned picture you'll get is far from smooth, and with the dim screen adds even further to your discomfort.

It's not all bad news though.

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What the Solo 9500 XL has in its favour are flexible upgrade options. Easy access has been kept in mind throughout, and each cover only requires the removal of one or two screws and a simple sliding catch to get inside. Both the CD-ROM and floppy drive slide out easily, and the former can be replaced with a CD-RW, second battery or hot-swappable hard disk. There are two SODIMM sockets under another easily removed cover, and with the one 128Mb module already in place you still have room to upgrade. Even mini-PCI access is a doddle and just a matter of removing a screw and taking out the supplied V.90 modem and IEEE-1394 combo card.

This shouldn't need replacing though, as IEEE-1394 is proving to be a useful feature on notebooks, and you can easily utilise the two PC Card slots if you need network functionality. Otherwise, all the necessary ports are provided - serial, parallel, VGA, PS/2 and two USB ports. There's also the unusual addition of an AC-3-compatible optical audio output, making it ideal for portable music work or DVD movie playback.

More importantly, as with the Dell Inspiron 8000 range, the core components revolve around the latest Intel 815 Solano 2-M motherboard chipset, with UltraDMA/66 and AGP 4x support. This helped the Solo 9500 knock out an impressive overall 2D benchmark score of 2.08 - an impressive feat for a Pentium III/750.

Even the 3D performance was impressive, managing a 3DMark2000 score of 2,272 at a resolution of 800 x 600 in 16-bit colour. Although, the aforementioned downscaling problems won't make for aesthetic visuals.

You would expect a machine like this to drain the best from any battery, but the nine-cell lithium ion battery lasted for an impressive 110 minutes in our strenuous test, so you could expect up to three hours in general use. However, unless you want to use yourself as a human heatsink, you won't want to keep the Solo 9500 on your lap for particularly long periods of time.

The Solo 9500 XL has its strengths and weaknesses; it's fast enough, but needs attention to heat dissipation and design. Also, while the screen is large, it lacks the even lighting and superb image quality of the Panrix Vision 800's 15in TFT. For your £1,949 plus an extra £19 for delivery you're not getting fantastic value for money either, and you'll need an extra £200 for the 850MHz version. In addition there's only a one-year return-to-base warranty, compared to the three years from Panrix. The 9500 has some interesting details, but needs more work to be worth the money.