Gateway kills the Connected DVD player?
One of my favorite devices and the source of hundreds of comments here and dozens of sales of the unit, may just be dead. The official Gateway DVD page no longer lists it for sale, even though it is mentioned in the page's title tag. Over the past few weeks, prices on the unit had fallen to just over $100, so it's not really too big a suprise to hear it's now gone from the page. They're now moving the DVD recorder at just $149.
If the change is permanent, it's a bummer to see it go, but hopefully they took it down to instead launch an updated unit (hey, I can dream, can't I?). If they combined the networking with a DVD player and recorder, I would jump at the chance to own one.
Gateway is slowly abandoning their consumer electronics lines. I believe they've dropped their Media Center PC, too.
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,697322,00.html
Posted by: Brian | October 11, 2004 at 04:28 PM
Weird, their TVs are still selling like hotcakes. I assume they're cutting all the dead weight, all the things that aren't huge profit centers.
Posted by: Matt Haughey | October 11, 2004 at 04:53 PM
Yep, Gateway is restructuring and refocusing their business yet again. The Gateway Stores lost money as did alot of their consumer electronic lines. The stores are closed and the consumer lines are going away.
Posted by: Scott | October 11, 2004 at 09:57 PM
They completely abandoned the DMP-X20 MP3 players. If you have one that breaks, they will tell you to "take it to a local electronics store" for service. Personally, I'd never buy another Gateway product. Ever.
Posted by: Bruce | October 12, 2004 at 07:01 AM
A little sad to see the Gateway branded box go, but when I learned about this several months ago I ended up going with the GoVideo D2730 anyway. It's got essentially the same guts and runs on the same digital5 middleware as do several other boxes selling under different brands. Plus it was a bit cheaper, slightly better looking (to me), and they had one sitting on the shelf in my local Good Guys that I could go poke at.
If I had to guess, it's actually competition that's making this uneconomical for Gateway. Plus, there's some indication that Gateway customer service doesn't really *get* consumer electronics. On one forum the caller was asked something like "Have you tried resintalling Windows from the CD?"
Posted by: Mike | October 13, 2004 at 09:35 AM
I ordered the connected DVD player from Gateway on September 20th and I'm not sure I'm ever going to get it! The ship date has been pushed back four times, and I just called today and was told their "order status system is down, call back tomorrow." I was so excited when I ordered it, now I don't expect to receive it. I'm just playing along to see how long Gateway is going to drag this out.
The GoVideo D2730 looks good, but I was looking to stay under $175. Any other products out there that compare?
Posted by: Will | October 26, 2004 at 12:08 AM
I too ordered mine on Sept. 20th. I just got an update yesterday that it's shipping and I should get mine tomorrow. We'll see.
Posted by: sport-o | November 03, 2004 at 01:35 PM
Mike or Will, let me know if you're interested in buying mine. I've had it for about 4 months, works great, I just don't need it anymore since I bought a new Windows Media Center PC and it hooks right to my TV :D
Let me know, 100 bucks, and it's yours.
Posted by: Ray Espinal | November 04, 2004 at 10:40 AM
sport-o - I'm interested - please email me at bigboy AT winisp DOT net (don't want spam that's why I'm spelling it out :)
Posted by: bigboy | November 05, 2004 at 05:32 PM
Sorry - that was Ray Espinal - I am interested, not sport-o. :)
By the way - is your unit ADC-320 ?
Posted by: bigboy | November 05, 2004 at 05:36 PM