Acer Gateway LT23 Netbook - Brings Nothing New to the Table

Acer’s previous offering, the Aspire One D260 we reviewed, was overpriced, considering it only had a 3G SIM card slot as a special feature. The current LT23 by Acer Gateway has standard specifications but is it any better than the D260? Let’s find out.

So what can you do?

Design and Build Quality
While the LT23 is not the best in terms of design; the external shell has a good looking glossy back colour. And with a dash of patterns, the netbook doesn’t attract too many smudges. Somehow, it doesn’t carry those good looks when you open the LT23. The insides have a very dull grey finish, which doesn’t appeal to me.

Neat looking LT23

Speaking of the insides, the keyboard is not spaced out well enough for comfortable typing. The keys are clustered and you’ll end up pressing the wrong ones a bit too often. Adding to that problem is the space between the trackpad and the keyboard. An average user always has the thumbs resting a little below the keyboard. Unfortunately, over here your thumbs are likely to touch the trackpad and in turn the cursor goes haywire. Personally speaking, conventional labeling on the keyboard would also look a lot better unlike the current labeling which looks a little cheap.  

Good trackpad but clustered layout

The trackpad is very responsive and you won’t have to struggle too much to use it. Plus it has multigesture which supports Circular-motion scrolling, Pinch-action zoom, and Page flip. However, the single mouse button design doesn’t go too well with users who are accustomed to having two separate buttons.  

In terms of build quality, there’s not a single instance where you feel that the LT23 has any cheap components of any sort. To sum it up, while the build quality is all good, the design of the keyboard was not very appealing.

Features
As I mentioned earlier, the LT23 does not have any special feature which can be called as its USP. The netbook has all the ports that your standard netbook would have.The LT23 has some good connectivity options with its Wi-Fi 802.11 n and Bluetooth 3.0 capabilities.

Ports and connectivity options? Check!

So it's quite apparent that the Acer Gateway doesn’t have any cool or awesome features to boast of, but what about the performance it offers?

Performance
We ran the LT23 through a series of synthetic and real world tests. Quite unsurprisingly, the performance was very average. If you’re wondering why it’s unsurprising, a quick look at the specs which is a single core Intel Atom N455M processor clocking 1.66 GHz with Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 and 2 GB of DDR3 RAM will tell you that you cannot really expect too much from this netbook. While real world tests like copying a 2 GB single file takes about 32 seconds, video encoding takes about 4 more minutes than that of the Toshiba NB520. The score sheet below gives you an overview of the synthetic and real world tests.

Average really...

Apart from benchmarks, the battery life of the LT23 matches that of a standard netbook with about 5 hours and 10 minutes which is obviously a good thing. Not only the battery life, the netbook’s display screen also functions very well. Viewing angles are quite comfortable although it wont be the best from a very wide angle.

All in all, LT23 certainly doesn’t boast of great performance apart from good battery life and a decent screen.

Verdict
After looking at all the features and the performance, it’s quite apparent that there’s no good reason why I can recommend the LT23 instead of the Toshiba NB520. For that matter, at least the previous AOD260 had a special 3G slot to talk about, but this has absolutely nothing and, at a price of Rs. 22,708, is not a good buy at all.