gali

After being served faithfully by my Asus Eee 901 for almost a year, I switched to using a Gigabyte T1028X for my mobile computing needs. Having been in possession of it for a little under a week now, I must say, it’s doing quite well for itself.

After being served faithfully by my Asus Eee 901 for almost a year, I switched to using a Gigabyte T1028X for my mobile computing needs. Having been in possession of it for a little under a week now, I must say, it’s doing quite well for itself.

The computer is still just about inside the netbook form factor of laptop, though it has a few qualities that set it apart from most in its class. Unfortunately, one of these is its price, and another (at present) is its availability over here in the UK, perhaps because it has only just seen worldwide light in recent months. Specific models of laptop and desktop computers don’t seem to have concrete release dates, and just seem to drift into availability as and when resellers can get their hands on them.

The official place to buy this netbook from, according to the Gigabyte web site, is Expansys, with a price at time of writing of £389.99. Unfortanately, they have no stock, and contacting them suggested they wouldn’t have stock until December, despite their web site suggesting they would have them ‘normally less than 5 days’ in the future. The few other places I found that stocked them within the UK were also out of stock, making me wonder if the laptop had officially reached our shores yet. Purelygadgets came to my rescue in the end, albeit at the steeper price of £461.50 (reduced from over £500, apparently). It’s quite a price bump, but judging by exchange rates from other countries I suspect this is more where the price is intended to be, and Expansys may be in for a little bit of a shock when they finally get details of their stock.

So, is the netbook worth 50-100% more of my hard earned cash than other netbooks? Fortunately for me, I wasn’t paying for the whole thing (it was my birthday last week), so that took the edge off it. That said, it did tick all the boxes for what I look for in a netbook, plus a few extras. My Eee 901 also ticked the boxes at the time I bought it, but since then it’s educated me a little in what I should be looking for.

Size and Weight (Portability)

I bought my Eee 901 because I was fed up lugging around a chunky laptop. Going back many years, my first laptop was a 15″ moderately-heavyweight Dell Inspiron, and my second measured up as a slightly less heavy 14″ model, also a Dell. After lugging either of these around for a while, even in a decent laptop-focussed backpack, it got a little tiresome. The Eee 901 solved these issues, weighing in at about 1kg, it was almost ignorable. The T1028X weighs a little more – it’s a leap from an 8″ netbook to a 10″ netbook after all – but it still falls within the category of lightweight.

Keyboard

My Eee taught me that with a netbook more than a laptop, I was going to have to learn to type again, almost from scratch. Every laptop has a few obscure keys in odd places, but the Eee offset some of the normal keys just enough to make my normal ability to touch-type fail me regularly, even after I’d been using it a while. Also, despite having gotten used to it somewhat after time, there’s no denying the keyboard was cramped. While related to the previous category of size, this made up my mind that if I were to invest in another netbook, I would aim for the larger form factor.

Of course, no one wants to design the perfect keyboard layout, and as a result the three keys immediately to the right of ‘M’ (comma, full stop, question mark) are slightly narrower than on most keyboards, making it easy to miss the one you want. The backslash key is also way over on the right hand side, whereas I’m used to it being on the left. I should also note that (probably relating to the availability comment earlier) the keys are a US layout, though I don’t notice this thanks to telling Windows to use a UK layout anyway. For any concerned, it did come with a UK power adapter.

Gripes aside, the T1028X’s keyboard is laid out nicely, with the keys clearly separated that feel very satisfying to type on. No longer do I feel my fingers scraping the sides of neighbouring keys as I type.

Screen

This is where the T1028X excels compared to other devices in its class. Most netbooks have a resolution that caps out at 1024×600. When I bought my Eee, there were still some knocking around with resolutions stuck at 800 pixels of width. For me, 1024 was usable, but still involved a fair amount of scrolling horizontally. Unfortunately, a lot of web page designers seem to think that designing a web site to fit in 1024 pixels of width means the page can be that wide, forgetting there are little things like scrollbars and window borders to consider. The T1028X boasts an impressive 1366×768 resolution. This does mean that the pixel density is quite high, and things can look a little small at first, but once your eyes adjust to this (assuming you don’t prefer things this way – I certainly do), it’s a resolution that you can be grateful of.

And if that isn’t enough, the T1028X boasts a touch screen layer across the top, and can be swivelled 180 degrees and laid flat across the keyboard to allow it to be used as a tablet PC. While it may not be the best touch screen in the world, it certainly isn’t bad considering that most other laptops that come with touch screens have price tags attached that are well over double. At first I thought it felt a little cheap to press the screen, as if the top layer of the screen wasn’t firmly attached, but this extra fraction of movement needed to ‘touch’ the screen soon became welcome as a sort of feedback that I was actually touching. The T1028X comes with a stylus that fits nicely into the top of the screen, though is not required – the screen works fine with a finger. Sadly, there’s no pressure sensitivity or multi-touch support, but for a netbook I’m not complaining.

Hard Drive

I’m all for the SSD revolution – they run very cool and are quiet thanks to the lack of moving parts. However, I have been feeling somewhat determined to move over to Windows 7 of late, and there was no practical way of running any more recent version of Windows than XP on my Eee – not without a lot of messing around anyway. Also, there are times when than little bit of extra storage would just be nice. Therefore, I’m sacrificing my desire to work in absolute silence for the 160Gb drive that comes with the T1028X – a drive that I formatted and repartitioned for Windows 7 usage almost immediately (which, I should add, runs like a dream).

Extras

There are a few other bits an pieces I need in a netbook, though thankfully they are a lot more standardised between devices than they were when I bought my Eee. As a result it includes wireless networking (apparently supporting 802.11n, but I’m not sure if that works yet), a memory card slot (supporting SD, MMC, and MemoryStick at least, compared to my Eee’s SD/MMC slot), Bluetooth (a must for mobile phone connectivity on the move) and a webcam. Quite a nice touch is that the various LED indicators on the front normally used to show power, hard drive activity and so on can be used to indicate battery life when the device is turned off.

Before I wiped the hard drive, the T1028X included Windows XP Home, which means no built in features for the touch-screen, beyond using it as a basic mouse pointer. Fortunately, Gigabyte include a number of little utilities for making your life easier, including software for defining a range of gesture-based actions, and a utility for controlling various aspects of hardware (screen brightness, wifi, bluetooth, etc) with nice big finger friendly buttons. I had a play with these before I wiped the hard drive, and all seemed to work well. Actually triggering gestures took some getting used to, but once you’d mastered them the only remaining challenge would be remembering them all, as the utility gives the power to define dozens of the things.

I proceeded to wipe the hard drive as part of the Windows 7 installation. I never appreciate why manufacturers make the partitioning decisions they do on new computers, and so always find myself reverting to something I feel is big enough for the operating system and any software I might install (about 50Gb in this case), and the rest for storage (the remaining 100Gb or so).

To my pleasant surprise, the Gigabyte web site had almost all the drivers and utilities for the T1028X available for both Windows XP and Windows 7 (no sign of Vista, even though the hardware is technically sufficient for it). The couple of things that weren’t included (the web cam and memory card reader) were supported by Windows 7 natively. Everything installed and works like a dream, with one exception: the gesture support. While the software installs, it refuses to allow itself to be configured. Defining a gesture is a case of ticking a box to turn it on, and then choosing the action. However, click OK and the tickbox merrily unticks itself, disabling the gesture once again. So, the gesture support Gigabyte provides simply does not work in Windows 7 at present. No multi-touch means that a lot of the touch features built into Windows 7 isn’t available either, though on this occasion the one exception is a favourable one. A feature called ‘flicks’ brings 8 basic gestures, based around touching a point of the screen and rapidly moving (‘flicking’) your finger in a direction. I think perhaps I’ll write a separate entry later about my combining this with a piece of software called AutoHotKeys, and a small Visual Basic application to get things set up the way I want.

With Windows 7 installed, along with the various software I want, and with things largely configured the way I want, I now find myself using the T1028X (which really does need a better name) most of the time. We’ll see how it does when the novelty wears off, of course, but I think for the moment it’s certainly earning its monetary value, and doing the job of being my mobile computer admirably.

And here are some scores to go with my experience so far: