Gadgetory

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 we've gone with a dog's face for the leapfrog sky no I'm just kidding we have an actual notebook to check out this is the gigabyte u 2 4 4 2 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 travelling professional that still wants decent performance because rather than using an ultra-low voltage chip gigabyte has opted for a an SV chip so the actual one here can go up to 3.2 gigahertz is the 30 to 30 M they've got a 14 inch 1600 by 900 display and a little bit of graphics horsepower to actually go behind it so it uses a GT 730 instead of the what did--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 fake leather material and that 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 HTC one next to it normally I'd expect to be a bit of a smaller power brick for a thin light but part of that could be the fact that gigabytes gone with a higher performance CPU as well as a GPU the utility driver disk you probably won't need because they've implemented a pretty cool functionality that allows you to access the BIOS as well as recovery options for the notebook simply by pressing a particular hotkey when you're in there they include a they include our cleaning cloth so rather than including a throwaway piece of paper inside here they include what's actually a fairly nice screen cleaning cloth that said that's a nice touch anyway so there's a there's one of the function keys we'll be able to access that through the BIOS which is kind of cool so there we go 14 inch LED backlit screen nice and thin let's do some more phone size comparisons just so that you guys have some idea what talking about they've got made in Taiwan branding all over it those of you who didn't know that gigabyte makes notebooks this is kind of relatively new to North America but they have been doing them for a while they've got what actually is kind of a nice finish on the top here so it's a it's a brushed metal finish that is in kind of 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 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 i/o on the side this is again part of the reason why you might might might not be as thin so it's performance parts inside so you've got a Kensington lock headphone microphone jack two USB 2.0 ports VGA out this is handy especially if you're traveling on business 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 than I 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 this is a little bit unique for our notebook of this form factor as well you'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 in videos optimist 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 whatever 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 out look at that it booted right up so I guess this is they actually have this ready to go as as a demo unit so let's find out what all the stuff does I'm sort of curious that it has a textured touchpad which actually has a very very different feel to it it's a little bit cool to the touch as well this isn't what I'm we used to touch pads being made out of it's kind of nice so let's go to the desktop I believe they include hi yes so this is kind of a funny thing now I've seen a lot of manufacturers approach this in different ways customers are confused about how to power down a Windows 8 machine because it used to be just let Start menu turn off whereas now you have to get to the charms menu which is hovering over the top right corner look been going to settings carefully without accidentally going outside of the charms menu then going to power so what gigabytes so I've seen I've seen Dania factures include little slips of paper that explained how to turn off the computer but this is sort of a unique approach there's a little power icon down there and they have included a stock taskbar thing that allows you to restart sleep hibernate shut down or shut down in fastboot mode very very very cool well one thing's for sure it's getting the seal of approval from my cat who is who is snuggling the notebook pretty good here there's not too much in terms of bloatware I mean you've got you know Nvidia graphics drivers physics drivers they've got a couple management tools but no sort of annoying like hey buy this buy this buy this you know antivirus is like overly aggressive anti viruses or anything like that so I mean quite frankly with Microsoft Security Essentials and and a lot of the free options out there I can't imagine a good reason to buy antivirus these days and I'm sure someone's gonna come out and tell me I'm wrong but there you go support 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 so there's a standard thing 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 this is kind of neat so I'm actually gonna power the notebook down and okay okay no well we'll finish we'll finish with the actual notebook first so the keyboard is LED backlit it's a chiclet 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 of a volume control as well as enabling bluetooth turning on the webcam cool stuff like that 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 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 the thing that's kind of cool to see implemented people of cool things we did figure out how to force on the LED backlight so you can see how bright it is it's actually the 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 two-and-a-half inch hard drive in it the the shell itself supports up to an M SATA SSD and an additional two and a half inch drive so you could add a hybrid drive or well an additional storage hard drive this one I already mentioned the 30 to 30 M processor as well as the 1600 by 900 LCD it's got eight gigs of ddr3 RAM I 128 gig M SATA SSD in this particular one two gigs of memory on that GT 730 m l2 I doubt that the extra memory will benefit you in any tangible way and then it supports 802.11 b/g/n as well as Bluetooth with a 4.0 so that's your Wireless and all that good stuff it supports on/off 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 have been doing for a long time but hasn't necessarily been implemented on all notebooks and we're gonna go ahead and use this little thing I actually kind of like that it's neat little widget they should make it available like the gigabyte shut down widget to anyone this is kind of cool so all these indicator LEDs over here Bluetooth Wi-Fi hard drive charging brightness let's check this out so see that little battery icon there if you right-click while the computers off haha 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 even when the notebooks off you can you can know how much battery life is left in your notebook overall construction is fairly plasticky the top feels nice but I wish that it had an equal sort of fit and finish to the bottom which is which is a plastic shell that does have a little bit of a little bit of flex you've got easy access to memory upgrades which is nice but I wish that you had easier access to the tune of half inch drive Bay I can see through these flats that that you don't 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 didn't want to do anything with it such as change the drives whether it's the M SATA 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 your first look at the U 2442 D this particular one from gigabyte don't forget to subscribe to our tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos