eMachines M6810 is one AMD Athlon64 beauty

IT TOOK a long time to arrive, but the eMachines M6810 notebook I picked after my round-up was in my hands in December. It was my first "eMachines" buy, and I admit that the fact that Gateway had something to do with the brand helped boost my confidence.

Exactly one year ago, Gateway . said it was buying eMachines, a brand once known mainly for its low-cost AMD-based desktop systems, but which soon gained adepts with their affordable notebooks -and now I now know why. I can confirm that Gateway Inc. has not disappointed me with the eMachines M6810.

While not top-of-the line, this system which you can get for about a thousand dollars delivers a lot of value for the money, and puts portable AMD64 performance at the reach of many pc buyers. My previous -and first- experience with the Gateway brand was the purchase of one Gateway Connected Touchpad, an excellent touch screen thin-client device powered by a Transmeta Crusoe CPU, Midori Linux, and the Mozilla web browser engine, whose development and sales. It was a product well ahead of its time and whose development I wish had continued.

So when I was handed my new eMachines M6810 in early December, I was very happy not only to be one of the early adopters on the block of AMD64 technology, but also to finally be able to sideline the Sony PCG-FRV26, an otherwise great P4 notebook but which was giving me the fits with its brain damaged ATI IGP-345M chipset, one that uses shared system ram for video, lacks frequent updates of its WinXP video drivers (hello, Sony, are you listening?), and lacks decent linux drivers (ATI completely ignores the IGP-345 on Linux). The eMachines M6810, on the other hand, features a full Mobility Radeon 9600 chipset with dedicated video memory, a chipset that has official Linux drivers from ATI and reasonable support on Xfree86 and X.org. To boot, it's got a larger, wide screen format (WXGA) LCD display, which means that I can finally watch widescreen DVDs at ease without having to win the lottery to purchase a wide-screen TV locally.

The eMachines M6810 and Sony PCG-FRV26

The M6810, like many of the offerings from Gateway and eMachines, comes pre loaded with WinXP home. I really, really would like to see them offering as a second option the same machines but also pre loaded with suitable user-friendly linux distros like Sun's Java Desktop System, Linspire or SUSE's Ximian. They wouldn't have to "support" every linux problem (that's what linux distro makers are for, after all), just offering working linux pre-loads "as is" would save those of us linux geeks a lot of time.

And I'm certainly not happy about the thought of having a part of my eMachines purchase going to Redmond's Evil Empire coffers to fund things I hate and complain about all the time like ActiveX, Digital Rights Management, IE, Outlook, and the like. I'm sure that if Gateway offered linux it'd boost the company profits as well because the linux licensing cost for these distros -at least in the case of Sun JDS Linux- are much cheaper than XP. Budget desktop PC maker Microtel has been doing exactly that with their AMD Sempron based desktops running Sun's linux distro.

Another view of the eMachines M6810 and Sony PCG-FRV26

The Four Seasons, the four quarters, and product "refreshes"
eMachines and Gateway's marketing strategy seem to be inspired by classical music, with an emphasis on Vivaldi. Ok, just kidding. But their product releases could follow the "four seasons", at least it would follow the fashion then... just imagine the headlines "here's Gateway's Spring 2004 line-up" ;). Instead, they follow the quarters -an influence from the financial community I bet-. The real surprising fact is that apparently if you don't buy a given product on the quarter it's released, your chances of getting it in the next diminish. I found this when I approached eMachines/Gateway and asked for a link to the M6810, -to include in this article- and was left wondering why I couldn't find new units of the M6810 for sale anywhere, I was told by the surprisingly friendly and responsive in-house PR staff at Gateway that what I bought was a "Fourth Quarter 2004 product" (sic). To quote them: "In terms of why you are now having difficulty finding the M6810 and M6811, we refresh our products every quarter. These were Q4 products", they replied. Refreshing, indeed. But I never heard of expiring products on a quarterly basis before.

Another thing I learned is that Gateway's distribution strategy needs some improvement. One can only wonder why such nice Athlon 64 notebooks like the M6810 weren't widely available, directly from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, for instance. The M6810 I purchased was offered on Amazon.com through U.S. retailer "J&R Music Computer world", for instance, not direct from Amazon.com's warehouses (they do carry Sony, Apple, Toshiba, Averatec, and plenty of other notebook brands). Gateway assured the Inquirer that the company's management team is "absolutely committed to making our products as widely available as possible", and when referring to the UK sales strategy, pointed to retail chain Dixons, "which owns the vast majority of the retail PC market in the U.K. - this was a logical starting point for the eMachines brand".

However the UK page didn't list the M6810, but rather the AMD Sempron based M5412. To see what Gateway/eMachines is offering for the UK marketplace, take a look at it here. "Dixons did not select our eMachines M6810, but we do offer a couple of very compelling mobile products there today", Gateway's PR spokesperson added, and concluded: "We have plans to expand distribution in the future and would love to see our products in major web-based retail outlets like Amazon, but these relationships take time to establish". Gateway Inc. left the overseas market to concentrate in domestic sales back in 2001 in the middle of financial difficulties, and only returned to the global marketplace recently with the merger with eMachines earlier last year.

Knowing the new toy
First of all, the eMachines M6810 looks nice. It's actually a bit more slim than the P4-powered Sony PCG-FRV26 it will replace, and the speakers are well placed -in the front of the notebook, below the keyboard level and facing the user. The speakers also sound better than those of the Sony -which are small-. The screen is bright -although with not such a high contrast ratio as the ultra bight Sony LCD -which some might consider too bright on its default settings-. The keyboard has a nice, soft feeling, the keys are big and it only took me a couple hours for my mind to adjust to the new keyboard. I only wish the INSert key were placed next to Delete and Backspace, not next to the space bar. One personal complaint not with this but with all notebooks -and desktops, for that matter-:, does Microsoft pay companies to include the darn "windows keys"?. I'd pay for having both surgically removed, and in the case of the M6810 keyboard, and the space bar replaced with a bigger one to use the space saved by both useless win-keys. At 7.5 lbs, it also weights less than the Sony FRV26, which tips the scale at 12 lbs, with a smaller screen.

Playing back a wide-screen format DVD

Second, I love its wide-screen LCD!. Sure, it runs at the somewhat strange 1280x800 resolution, but I found this wider screen perfect, specially since it lets me run Mozilla 1.7 and Netscape 7.2 with the sidebar open all the time, without affecting my web page browsing (even for sites optimized for 1024x768). DVD and movie junkies will love the ability to play back wide-screen movies on its nice 15.4-inch display as well. Unlike the Sony's two measly pair of USB 2.0 ports, the M6810 includes FOUR, plus one firewire, a s-video video output connector in the back, and a built-in 6-in-1 memory card reader supporting every flash memory format known to mankind -the Sony VAIO on the other hand offers just a Sony Memory Stick slot, for obvious reasons. The only thing I can complain about is the single cardbus slot. I admit that more and more peripherals come in USB versions rather than cardbus, yet, the chipset inside the M6810's system board should support two slots, not only one. So it was probably a decision based on making the notebook as thin as possible. Even then, the single cardbus slot could be replaced with two slots, and the memory card reader slots moved to the front side, right below the touch pad.

Speaking of which, the touch pad is nice and responsive. I didn't have to change a single setting related to sensitivity or dpi. The defaults are just right. WiFi is included in the form of a MiniPCI wifi card inserted behind one plastic door in the bottom of the unit. The Wifi chipset in this MiniPCI card is a "54g MaxPerformance" by Broadcom. The ethernet port is managed by a VIA Rhine II chipset, and the dial-up modem is the usual (sadly) Conexant SoftK56 "winmodem". But who's using dial-up anyway?. It's good to have a fall-back option to the caveman times, still. The DVD reader and CD-RW writer is a widely supported Lite-on LSC-24082K . Finally, the hard drive is a 60GB Hitachi DK23FA-60 that works very silently, you have to put your ear next to the notebook and be quiet to hear it.

The power bricks of the P4 Sony VAIO and eMachines M6810 contrasted, compared.

Finally, the power brick is significantly smaller and weights much less than the heavy anvil the size of a vhs tape that the power-hungry P4 Sony uses. The performance? I haven't done any real benchmarks, but it certainly "feels" faster than the 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 Sony VAIO I used until now. Keep reading the INQ for some upcoming tests, as I plan to use the Gateway/eMachines AMD Athlon 64 platform for any future software reviews.

A look at the connectors in the back and side. Apologies for the poor lighting.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Good: Excellent screen. Nice keyboard and placement of connectors in the right place. Your wrists rest gracefully while typing, no need for a wrist pad.
Great performance. A real ATI Radeon, one linux-friendly video graphics chipset (9600) with dedicated video ram. Did I mention that the ATI Radeon IGP-345M is the worst piece of silicon I've ever seen?. Oh, I did already. Sorry about that.
Built-in 802.11g / 802.11b wifi, haven't had a chance to test it yet, but it should be more linux friendly than Intel's "centrino".

Bad: Single cardbus port. The back of the LCD lid looks flimsy, unlike the one in the Sony it replaces.

Ugly: the flimsy LCD back should be redesigned. But apparently it has survived me for over than a month of abuse and travel.

64-bit AMD Athlon64 CPU Information

This is not a full review, just a "first looks" article, but if it were, right now I'd give this unit 4.5 out of five Fernandos in my personal one-to-five rating scale. I hope that eMachines and gateway continues this path. Kudos to the system designers, and I hope Gateway oils its world-wide distribution system!. Everyone should be able to purchase one of these systems at the nearest computer store. And with Linux-preloaded if they want it. µ