welcome to my unboxing and first look at a very unique notebook design now you
can see that instead of going with a more traditional LCD display they've
gone with a dog face for the leap frog SC no I'm just kidding we have an actual
notebook to check out this is the Gigabyte U
2442 and there is a rhyme and reason behind that naming scheme but it's
probably more complicated than is worth going into this is a thin and light
notebook that is aimed at sort of your your traveling professional that still
wants decent performance because rather than using an ultra low voltage chip uh
Gigabyte has opted for a an SV chip so
the actual one here can go up to 3.2 GHz it's the
3230m they've got a 14in 1600x 900
display and a little bit of Graphics horsepower to actually go behind it so
it uses a gt730 instead of the what it what would
normally be used with a thin and light notebook which is the Intel onboard
Graphics in terms of accessories we've got a little Gigabyte carrying case
which is sort of a a fake leather
material and then it has two velcro pieces here as well as kind of a
microfiber inside there's also a thing of do not eat inside so you can go ahead
and put your notebook in there in order to carry it around it also comes with a
pretty standard looking power brick so here's my traditional phone size
comparison there's an HTC1 next to it uh normally I'd expect to be see a bit of a
smaller power brick for a thin and light but part of that could be the fact that
Gigabyte's gone with a higher performance CPU as well as a GPU uh the
utility driver disc you probably won't need because they've implemented a
pretty cool functionality that allows you to uh access the BIOS as well as
recovery options for the notebook simply by pressing um a particular hotkey when
you're in the oh look at that they include a uh they include a cleaning
cloth so rather than including a a throwaway piece of paper inside here
they include what's actually a fairly nice screen cleaning cloth that's a
that's a nice TCH um anyway so there's uh there's one of
the function keys we we'll be able to access that through the BIOS which is
kind of cool so there we go 14-in LED backlit screen nice and thin let's do
some more phone size comparisons just so that you guys have some idea what we're
talking about they've got made in Taiwan branding all over it those of you who
didn't know that Gigabyte makes notebooks uh this is kind of relatively
new to North America but they have been doing them for a
while uh they've got what actually is kind of a nice finish on the top here so
it's uh it's a brushed Metal finish that is in kind of a a champagne color up
here with just simple branding I mean it's it's one thing for people who
really want a notebook that's like flashy and all that but for for me
personally I like something that's just a little bit more plain looking it's not
super super thin but it's also not thick by any stretch of the imagination so
here we'll do our usual size comparison here there we go in terms of IO on the
side this is Again part of the reason why you might it might not be as th so
it's performance parts inside so you've got a Kensington lock headphone
microphone Jack uh two USB 2.0 ports VGA
out this is Handy especially if you're traveling on business um gigabit
Ethernet so there you go see I mean it has things like an Ethernet port I still
like to have an Ethernet port that still does mean something to me and if that
means it has to be a little bit thicker then um I've found myself quite a few
times with my Aspire S7 that I've been using lately wishing it had an Ethernet
port whenever I have problems with wireless connectivity or whatever else
uh this is a little bit unique for a notebook of this form factor as well they've got dual exhaust vents at the
back and this is again likely because they've added more GPU horsepower than
you'd normally have on a notebook like this with that said if you're not
actually using the GPU it shouldn't have too much of an adverse effect on the
battery life because it does support NVIDIA's Optimus technology which is GPU
switching so it'll use the onboard Graphics whenever it doesn't need the
additional horsepower and it'll use the dedicated graphics whenever it does on
this side you've got your power in as well as HDMI USB 3 and an SD card slot
and then we also find oh look at that it booted right up so I guess this is uh
they actually had this ready to go as a as a demo unit so let's find out what
all the stuff does I'm sort of curious
oh look at that it has a textured touchpad which actually has a very very
different feel to it it's uh it's a
little bit cold to the touch as well this isn't what I'm normally used to
touch pads being made out of it's kind of nice
management tools but no sort of annoying
like hey buy this buy this buy this um
you know antiviruses like overly aggressive antiviruses or anything like
that so I mean quite frankly with Microsoft Security
Essentials um and and a lot of the free options out there I can't imagine a good
reason to buy um antivirus these days
and I'm sure someone's going to come out and tell me I'm wrong but there you go
smart manager that's cool so you press this button and you can change your
volume settings brightness power mode Let's see what kind of power modes we
got here so custom power saver balance
high performance okay these are just standard things so they've just made a little skin for it switching between
monitors things like that it's nice to have a little dedicated button for it though and it closes if you press it
again uh this is kind of neat so I'm actually going to power The Notebook down and okay okay no we'll we'll finish
we'll finish with the actual notebook first so the uh keyboard is Led backet
it's a chicklet keyboard and what it does is it actually dynamically adjusts
its brightness according to the environment so it's obviously not on right now because we're filming a video
so we actually needed some light function keys are able to put it into
sleep turn your Wireless on and off brightness up and down switch to an
external display more vol uh volume control as well as enabling Bluetooth
turning on the webcam cool stuff like that um this is kind of oh right
configuration so it uses a double antenna Wi-Fi which gigabytes claiming
is able to achieve up to double the performance so what I'm assuming is that
they've implemented a concurrent dual Band Wi-Fi solution which actually will
improve performance dramatically so that's that's another that thing that's
kind of cool to see implemented couple of cool things we did figure out how to force on the uh LED backlight so you can
see how bright it is it's actually quite bright looks like the keys are individually lit and I did determine
that although this particular one that I'm holding here doesn't have a 2 and 1
half inch hard drive in it the the shell itself supports up to an MSA SSD and an
additional 2 and 1/2 in drive so you could add a hybrid drive or uh um well
an additional storage hard drive this one I already mentioned the 3230m
processor as well as the 1600 by 900 LCD it's got 8 gigs of DDR3 RAM I 128 gig
MSA SSD in this particular one 2 gigs of
memory on that gt730m although I doubt that the extra memory will benefit you
in any tangible way and then it supports 802.11 BGN as well as Bluetooth
4.0 so that's your wireless and all that good stuff it supports onoff charging
which means that even when the notebook is powered down you can charge devices
off of it which is just kind of Handy it's one of those things that desktops been doing for a long time but hasn't
necessarily been implemented on all notebooks and we're going to go ahead
and use this little thing I actually kind of like that it's a neat little widget they should make it available
like the Gigabyte shutdown widget to uh to anyone this is kind of cool so all
these indicator LEDs over here Bluetooth Wi-Fi hard drive charging uh I don't
know brightness check this out so see that little battery icon there if you
right click while the computer's off ha it's a battery indicator so I checked in
Windows and it's got about 60% battery so you can quickly check and see oh look
at that it has just over half battery yay uh even when the notebook's off you
can you can know how much uh battery life is left in your notebook overall
construction is fairly plasticky uh the top feels nice but I wish that it had an
equal sort of fit and finish to the bottom which is H which is a plastic
shell that does have a little bit of a little bit of flex um you've got easy
access to memory upgrades which is nice but I wish that you had easier access
access to the 2 and 1/2 in Drive Bay I can see through these slats that that
you don't and it looks like you'll have to remove the whole bottom of the notebook with that being said what is
good about an approach like this is that simply by removing these screws you have
access to the entire bottom of the notebook so if you did want to do anything with it such as uh change the
drives whether it's the MCA drive or the hard drive itself then that would be
fairly doable for you there's an included webcam up here and other than
that I don't think that we have missed anything thank you for checking out my
unboxing and first look at the u44 to D
this particular one from Gigabyte don't forget to subscribe to L's Tech tips from unboxings reviews and other
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