Gateway CX200

Aside from being too heavy to carry for long, the CX200 is a nice tablet. The screen unfailingly registered my stylus taps and handwriting. It seems prone to smudges, but the included cleaning cloth wipes off fingerprints in a jiffy.

The CX200's design is not as slick as some tablets. For instance, many models have a stylus that easily springs up from its holder, but the CX200 has a separate bottom release. Also, this unit's on-screen picture does not automatically rotate when you reorient the screen from landscape to portrait and vice versa. But the tablet buttons are conveniently located and include a multi-mode control that changes volume or scrolling. Two other nice bonuses are a power button lock and a BIOS-level option to activate a missing-pen alarm. The latter is a polite beep that sounds when you turn off the CX200 without returning the stylus to its holder.

Nicely designed as a notebook, too, the CX200 includes audio ports and a three-in-one memory card reader conveniently located on the front, with three USB ports and a high-speed FireWire port on the left. Sound is weak, but DVD movies looked great on the wide screen. The same battery that makes such a good tablet grip gives the keyboard a comfortable ergonomic typing slant.

The CX200 is fairly expandable, with upgradable memory and storage, one PC Card slot, and a left-side set of pins for Gateway's $179 port replicator. Given the docking stations some companies sell for their tablets, however, a replicator that attaches by cable is not very elegant, but it's better than nothing.

Speed was good in general, but compared with other 2.13-GHz Pentium M 770-equipped notebooks with 1GB of RAM, the CX200's WorldBench 5 score of 86 was so-so. A larger, similarly configured laptop we tested earned a better score--97.

The CX200's 3-hour battery life was also a little disappointing considering the high-capacity battery we tested with. Using two batteries at once is possible by removing the optical drive, but we didn't try this configuration.

Upshot: Although a very heavy tablet, the CX200 can be among the least expensive available and a good notebook. Go for the $1099 configuration (plus the $44 high-capacity battery); much lighter tablets are available on the high end.

Carla Thornton