 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's face for the leapfrogs. No, I'm just kidding. We have an actual notebook to check out. This is the Gigabyte U2442 and there is a rhyme and reason behind that naming scheme, but it's probably more complicated than it's worth going into. This is a thin and light notebook that is aimed at sort of your traveling professional that still wants decent performance because rather than using an ultra-low voltage chip, Gigabyte has opted for an SV chip. So the actual one here can go up to 3.2 GHz. It's the 3230M. They've got a 14-inch 1600 x 900 display and a little bit of graphics horsepower to actually go behind it. So it uses a GT730 instead of 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 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 HTC One next to it. Normally I'd expect to 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. 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 the... Oh, look at that. They include a 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's a nice touch. Anyway, so 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 of 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, 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 brushed metal finish that is in kind of a champagne color up here with just simple branding. It's one thing for people who really want a notebook that's 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 it 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, then 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. 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, they actually had this ready to go 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 a little bit cold to the touch as well. This isn't what I'm normally used to touchpads being made out of. It's kind of nice. So let's go to the desktop. I believe they include high, 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 you just went start menu, turn off. Whereas now you have to get to the charms menu, which is hovering over the top right corner, then going to settings carefully without accidentally going outside of the charms menu, then going to power. So what gigabytes? So I've seen manufacturers include little slips of paper that explain 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 fast boot 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 antivirus is or anything like that. So, I mean, quite frankly, with Microsoft Security Essentials 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 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. 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. This is kind of neat. So I'm actually going to power the notebook down and OK. OK, no, 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 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 Gigabyte's 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 thing that's kind of cool to see implemented. Couple 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 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 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 3230M processor as well as the 1600 by 900 LCD. It's got eight gigs of DDR3 RAM, 128 gig M-SATA SSD in this particular one, two gigs of memory on that GT730M, although I doubt that the extra memory will benefit you in any tangible way. And then it supports 802.11BGN as well as Bluetooth 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 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 anyone. This is kind of cool. So all these indicator LEDs over here, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, hard drive, charging, brightness. Check this out. So see that little battery icon there? If you right click while the computer's off, 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 notebook's 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 two and a half inch drive bay. I can see through these slats 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 MC to drive or the hard drive itself, then that would be fairly doable for you. So that's it for the review of the new 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 U2442D, this particular one from Gigabyte. I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.