Gateway C-142XL Tablet PC Review

Posted by John P. on May 26th, 2008 Comments Printer-Friendly

Tablet PCs are becoming more and more popular these days in college and the workplace, today we’re reviewing one of the latest on the market, Gateway’s C-142XL convertible tablet PC.

The C-142XL is Gateway’s high-end tablet and it’s packed to the brim with features: a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB of DDR2 RAM, a 250GB 5400rpm SATA hard drive, an 8x dual-layer DVD burner, an ATI Mobility Radeon X2300HD graphics card, and rounding it off with Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and 802.11a/b/g wireless networking. It also has a gorgeous 14″ glossy display with a resolution of 1280×768 and can be instantly flipped around from a standard laptop to a tablet in seconds.

It isn’t the lightest notebook however, starting at over 6 pounds - and it’ll certainly give your arm a workout if you’re carrying it all day in tablet mode. Tablets are meant to be thin and light, right? For extra security, you’ll find a biometric fingerprint reader near the keyboard.

In our benchmarks the C-142XL is a great performer and should handle anything you throw at it, with the exception of some graphics-intensive games. In our PCMark Vantage tests, the tablet received a score of 3149. In our CINEBENCH graphics tests, the single-core tests received a score of 2632 and the dual-core test received a score of 4906 with a multiprocessor speedup of 1.86.

Battery life was very good and when doing web browsing and running productivity apps, the C-142XL’s battery lasted for around 4 to 5 hours.

The only couple of problems we had were that the tablet is somewhat bulky and heavy to carry around and there is no support for 802.11n wireless networking. There is also no auto-rotation function that rotates the display to portrait mode when flipped down, you have to manually rotate the screen using the button on the bottom edge of the display.

The C-142XL convertible tablet PC is available from Gateway starting at $1299.

Pros