It seems the fading Gateway still has some fight left in it. The former computer giant has unveiled its contender for the iMac throne with something Gateway calls, simply, One.

Tale of the tape:

• 3.6″ thick all in all
• 19-inch widescreen LCD
• 2 models at US$1300/US$1800
• 1.5GHz/2GHz Core 2 Duo
• 2GB/3GB memory
• 320gb/500gb hard drive
• special online-only model at US$1500
• all black front
• metal shell
• all cords and most ports out of sight (all on the power adapter)
• side-mounted slot-loading DVD burner
• no announced date of availability, but soon

Now call me silly, but doesn’t that look like something we all know?

A blogger posted a big thank you to Apple for making him switch from Vista to Mac, then back to Vista. While on the surface this sounds like a back-handed compliment, it actually makes sense - I think.

Aviv Eyal, co-founder and VP of Grouper Networks (which was eventually acquired by Sony), and co-founder of Friskit, wrote in his blog that Macs made him appreciate Windows Vista, which had previously confounded him no end:

I was getting very frustrated with Vista on several of my PCs and laptops on a daily basis to a point that I stopped enjoying working on computers. On a clean Vista Pro install with just IE, Outlook and Office on strong Dell workstations and on a Vaio laptop, I kept getting hangs and crashes left and right. I now run Vista using the excellent Parallels Desktop for Mac software. It is worth every penny.

Eyal calls Windows the “light” side of the force, and Macs and OS X the “dark” side. He expounds further on this odd compliment:

With 4GB of RAM on a 2.4ghz Intel core 2 duo MacBook Pro laptop, I get very decent performance from Vista running virtually in Parallels, in full-screen mode it is easy to forget that you are not running Vista natively, so if I need to use word or powerpoint I just switch back to the dark side virtually on Parallels and if Vista hangs crashes I just quickly restore the virtual machine to a previous state while I keep working on my Mac apps.

Uh …ok. I think. At least this underscores that fact that there is no reason not to buy a Mac these days. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons.

Check out Eyal’s post on his blog here.

Several days ago users of Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger who used dotMac addresses to get their Windows Live IDs found out that they were being blocked from using the online service. When trying to log in, it would return an error message that told them they had now had to change their address in order to continue using the service.

Because of a recent system update, you must change the email address that you use to sign in to Windows Live Messenger. Until you change your email address, you won’t be able to use Windows Live Messenger.

Eh? Ex-squeeze me? Baking powder?

Other users who registered with other addresses like GMail were not affected, and only those with .Mac-related logins were specifically rejected from the Microsoft service.

MacNN contacted Microsoft about this, and MS officials told MacNN that it had recently become aware of an

…internal error during routine testing that resulted in customers using .Mac domains being asked to change their e-mail address in order to access to their Windows Live IDs.

Internal error. Surrrrre it was. Some code became wonky and spontaneously, independently and without human intervention, began mysteriously blocking their IM users, but somehow only those using dotMac addresses. Internal error. Creepy code, that.

Microsoft immediately created a support page for affected users and further apologized in a statement that read in part:

Access to Live IDs has been restored to our customers who use .Mac domains. We regret any inconvenience this caused for our customers.

Hmph. We regret it too.

(This begs the question: why would some folk who obviously use Macs actually sign up for a Microsoft online service? Does this imply that they deserve what they got? Hmm.)

The first contender for the iPhone throne has been unveiled. Or at least what it would look like it if had been.

At the Intel Developers Forum (Fall 07)’s ultramobility keynote today, Intel revealed a hybrid handheld PC/phone running on their new low-cost, low-power Moorestown platform (the more highly integrated successor to the Silverthorne chipset they’re still developing), that looks suspiciously like a stretched-out something we all know.

Actually, this is a mock-up of something that the Moorestown chip might be useful for (like iPhones), and the iPhone-ish-ness of the phony device is intentional. But it does give us a clue to where all this stuff Apple started is going to go.

Hmm. Well, all’s fair in love and tech development.

More pics and details from AnandTech.

Been looking for anything as iPhone-like as possible that I can tinker with now to make the interminable wait easier, and I came across something in the office that, uh, touched closer than the others - the HTC Touch.

It was released earlier in the year and talk has been circulating, as talk will, that this one would sort of steal the thunder of the iPhone a bit on its release. Not quite. Truth be told, it’s just a touch-screen Windows smartphone with a thin veneer of iPhone-ness painted delicately on top. Once you get used to the TouchFLO interface (which would be really really really fast - it’s more of a showy gimmick than anything) the HTC Touch is just a Windows Mobile smartphone with a few nice tweaks.

TouchFLO is just three repeating screens you can swipe across to change, and once you tap on a menu item, boom, it drops you into regular Windows Mobile Land. Swipe up to get the screen back, down to remove. Otherwise, nothing new. That’s it. You can even just ignore TouchFlo entirely if you wanted to, and it would be easy to do.

To be fair, it’s pretty responsive and fast, extremely light and compact (if not the lightest, most convenient to use smartphone ever) and if I were into Windows smartphones this would be the one I’d buy. But this isn’t serious competition for the iPhone.

Full review in the next issue of my magazine Mobile Philippines. Meantime, here’s a little video I made of the TouchFLO interface so you have an idea what I’m talking about:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxCu125xQ-Y]