Gigabyte T1000P Netvertible: First Impressions

The free netbook I received from TechEd Australia 2009, an HP Mini 2140, decided to die on me a couple of weeks ago. I’ve always had trouble with HP hardware, and even more with their support, so it wouldn’t have been my choice of netbook if I was to buy it myself, but it was free so I was more than happy to take it home.

Well, I realised that I had become quite used to carrying a netbook around for being on-call, so I decided to find a replacement. A new motherboard for the 2140 was around $200 on eBay, which is compatively cheap to what I ended up with, but I think it was worth it.

So I ended up buying a Gigabyte T1000P “netvertible” (the unofficial term for a netbook/tablet hybrid), which so far is a pretty decent little machine.

What’s in the box?

  • Quick start guide
  • User’s manual
  • Utility and driver disc
  • Warranty card and information
  • Spare stylus
  • 6-cell battery
  • Power supply
  • Cleaning cloth
  • Magnetic closing case
  • The T1000P

What’s good?

  • The touch screen is very responsive for a resistive touch screen panel (the best I’ve used)
  • The screen isn’t super-glossy, which means it might not look as asthetically pleasing, it doesn’t show fingerprints as much (but it’s not immune)
  • The eSATAp (eSATA/USB) port for attaching external SATA hard drives
  • The Intel Atom N470 1.83GHz 64-bit processor
  • 1Gbps network card (standard in notebooks these days, but netbooks are still catching up)
  • The 10.1″ multi-touch WXGA HD LED backlit screen with a display resolution of 1366 x 768
  • Upgradable components are easily accessible via panels on the underside of the system

What’s not so good?

  • There’s no accelerometer for auto-screen rotation, so you need to use the Gigabyte SmartManager software to manually alter the screen rotation
  • The screen could be nicer, especially if they made it flush with the bezel rather than recessed
  • There are no PXE boot options in the BIOS, so boot from external optical drive or USB are your other only main options
  • The System UUID, which is meant to be a unique value normally based off the MAC address, looks like it’s still a generic testing UUID
  • There’s no Windows Security Button, which means you need to flip out of tablet mode to use the keyboard to press CTRL + ALT + DEL to log in to a domain
  • Mouse buttons require a hard press
  • No option for a 7200RPM drive
  • Stylus feels a bit un-natural to remove from the recess – A magnetic release would be nice

Photos (taken with a low-res camera, sorry)

http://img21.imageshack.us/g/imag0515u.jpg/

Overall, I think this machine deserves about a 3.5/5