Gateway has been relaunched in the United Kingdom and Europe as a brand devoted to products for medium-sized businesses. Its upcoming range includes notebooks, desktops, servers and LCD monitors.
Acer, which bought the Gateway PC business in late 2007, said in a statement on Thursday that it is positioning Gateway in that sector to avoid overlap with other Acer-owned brands. It said its Acer brand signifies computers for the home office and small business market, while Packard Bell is consumer-oriented, and eMachines occupies the budget end of the market.
"Ours is a new brand with a new organization and a new business model," Antonio Papale, Acer's Gateway division director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said in the statement.
Gateway does not plan to do direct sales, and it is looking for business partners in specific geographical areas to resell its products to medium-sized businesses. The manufacturer is targeting the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy first, with France, Germany and Netherlands next on its list.
Gateway's notebooks will be made available in 12.1-inch and 15.4-inch formats, both using magnesium cases. Security features on all models include the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) utility for saving password and biometric information on a dedicated, motherboard-based chip, and a fingerprint scanner. The notebooks are guaranteed for at least 25,000 working hours, or around five years of use.
The PCs will come in three sizes, Gateway said: tower, "small form factor" and "ultra small form factor". The servers will be available in two-way or 1U and 2U rack formats, and the LCD displays will be in 22- and 19-inch sizes. The names, specifications and images of specific upcoming Gateway models were not available at the time of writing.
The brand was originally launched in 1985 with the founding of Gateway 2000 in Iowa as a direct sales PC company. The company moved into and out of retail, buying low-end PC maker eMachines in 2004 before being bought by Acer.
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