Gigabyte gets official with 8.9-inch M912V swivel screen netbook

It has taken long enough, but Gigabyte finally saw fit to make official its intriguing M912V. If you'll recall, this critter popped up and caught eyes at Computex, as it's essentially a netbook with a swivel screen -- think Tablet PC, but miniature. Specs wise, you're looking at an 8.9-inch WXGA (1,280 x 768) LED-backlit panel, Intel's 1.6GHz Atom processor, a 2.5-inch HDD (120/160/250GB), 1.3-megapixel camera, twin 1.5-watt speakers, 1GB of RAM and your choice of Windows XP, Vista or Linux. Furthermore, you'll find Bluetooth, WiFi, an ExpressCard slot, a wide of array of ports and even an option for HSDPA expansion. It should be noted that there's no internal optical drive (nor a price or release date just yet), but at least Gigabyte's offering up a netbook with some inkling of innovation, right?

[Via PCLaunches]

[solu Posted Jul 5th 2008 4:24PM]

take off Vista and knock off 100 bucks and I'd buy it.

[apeguero Posted Jul 5th 2008 4:33PM]

Me wants! Bigger than my Vaio UX380n but the touch screen, HDD, Express Card, processor sure do make it irresistible and the price might be just right too.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 5th 2008 4:37PM]

Perfect except for the fact it:

1) Doesn't have a dedicated graphics card for mid-range gaming.
2) Google Earth will lag on it.
3) Vista will crawl on it.
4) XP is great but it's handwriting recognition is nothing compared to Vista's.

Also the swivel touchscreen blows when compared to the HTC shift's slide and tilt form factor. I'd save money for the next Shift.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 5th 2008 4:49PM]

except :

1) mid-range gaming card will bring up the price up and increase the size
2) are you sure, have you benchmarked it?
3) are you sure, have you benchmarked it?
4) Vista is an option (oh right, #3, my mistake)

The next shift might be in the $800 dollar range (seeing that the diamond is in the $700 range) without subsidy.

[gsharm Posted Jul 5th 2008 5:01PM]

Perfect except for the fact it:

1) Doesn't have a geforce 9800 GTX graphics card for hardcore gaming, which I do all on my commutes. I need to run Crysis on this little bitch, and get my thing on, godammit. Where is the high definition optical mouse and weight packs?

2) Google Earth will lag on it. You need 8-core CPU for Google earth. Losers run Google earth on 2-core CPUs, it only renders at 50fps. I won't run Google earth any less than 500fps on my Mac Pro because otherwise I can't see anything and it crashes.

3) Vista will crawl on it. It doesn't come with Vista, but it will crawl on it. If you install Vista on it. All the other Atom PCs are way faster for running Vista because they have more thermal grease on the CPUs. I use Dell XPS 2000 for vista all the time and it's only about 5x bigger but I get way more frags with it. Why get this when you can get that.

4) XP is great but it's handwriting recognition is nothing compared to Vista's. So you should install Vista. It crawls though. Get a Dell XPS 2000. That can run Crysis too.

Also it doesn't slide so it's shitty, I want an iPhone.

[Genjinaro Posted Jul 5th 2008 5:50PM]

Umm HELLO, its a damn cheapy netbook! Why would it ever meet those expectations?!

No, no its not gonna be any kinda computing beast. And how do you know if Google Earth wil be slow on it? GE sure runs fast on my Eee & last time I checked its capabilites weren't stellar either.

And how did iPhone get into the picture...? Wait you're screwing with us.......right?

[Sarig Posted Jul 5th 2008 5:50PM]

I love you :)

[1 Posted Jul 5th 2008 6:05PM]

--->Joke
.
.
.
.
.
.
--->Noiro's Head

[YpoCaramel Posted Jul 5th 2008 6:29PM]

Also, the eeePC 1000H has n-wireless. The Wind and 1000H have also pulled 4-5 hours battery life in reviews - the specs here say 3.5.

Waiting for a review to address the following concerns:
Battery life.
Screen quality (LEDs shouldn't be too bad, but still)
Build quality.

I wonder if it can be upgraded to 2gb ram? The Wind, for example, makes it easy, although it technically voids waranty.

[gerrrg Posted Jul 7th 2008 12:37AM]

wth? led-backlit lcd screens isn't good enough for you? meanwhile, all big-screen lcds are switching from fluourescent backlighting to leds.

[johnnyhateswaiting Posted Jul 5th 2008 6:08PM]

@chase don't be stupid. There are lots of professional that care about these smaller computers. We do real work not play games on them (although I agree it would be nice.).

What is good about this is that it has a reasonable screen a size with a reasonable resolution (this seems the minimum size to run most apps).

Also it has a touch screen and converts into a tablet. So if the battery life is decent (over 5 hrs) and the weight isn't too bad then I think it's great. Basically the Fujitsu p1620 for half the price.

Which is really why this small computer is a big deal. Just like the Eee Pc it is a new pricing structure. It's hard to have Fujitsu justify why their same spec machine is over twice as much. So then the high end machines have to be a whole lot better.

As far as use, have you ever traveled? How about worked in a company where a lot of your time is in meetings? You wanna lug around a laptop all the time? I have the Fujitsu U810. Nice machine and does 90% of what I need on the go.

I almost got the p1620 but figured these were coming out and I would wait.

The touch screen makes these small computers a whole lot more user friendly.

[YpoCaramel Posted Jul 5th 2008 6:29PM]

Regarding the optical drive, the Kohjinsha SR (Intel A800) and SX (Intel Atom 1.33) series are tablets that have an optical drive, but they're available only under other brand names or imports.

[PEZ Posted Jul 5th 2008 8:16PM]

OooooooooooooH, this looks tasty. I would like ot see GPSand a dual atom. Soon.. soooon.

[jhoff80 Posted Jul 5th 2008 8:25PM]

FOR EVERYONE BASHING VISTA:

The reason to put Vista on one of these is VERY simple. Vista's handwriting recognition is a million times better than XP Tablet Edition.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 5th 2008 11:44PM]

I do like vista, but this laptop only has one gig of ram, and vista likes more ram. if it had two gigs or more of ram then it's fine, but if its got less then you should go with something like xp or a linux distro

[jhoff80 Posted Jul 6th 2008 12:18PM]

Like I said, for a Tablet, the idea of using anything other than Vista is just ridiculous. (See the video posted below about handwriting recognition for an example.)

While yeah, 2 GB RAM would be preferred for it (maybe its upgradable?) , Vista will run perfectly well on 1GB. I ran it on an Athlon XP 2700 with 1GB ram for a year. I mean, this is a netbook, you're not doing any gaming on it, so it should be fine, even if 2GB is preferred.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 6th 2008 10:52PM]

I actually own an HP tx1000 tablet pc and I know what your talking about, but I when I go into task manager I see 800 megs of memory usage and I am the type of user that goes into msconfig and disables services for less system overhead

[FuturePastNow Posted Jul 5th 2008 9:18PM]

Nice. Great screen, convertible tablet, plenty of storage. This might be the one to buy.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 5th 2008 11:41PM]

I don't like this trend of no optical drives on laptops. I think that manufacturers should hold off on leaving them of until the hardware actually becomes obsolete.

[Chester Farnsworth Posted Jul 6th 2008 12:06AM]

Optical drives are obsolete for a lot of people. I install most programs and drivers from downloads. The only CD/DVDs I use are to install operating systems which an external optical drive can deal with just fine. Even the optical drive on my pre-Eee PC laptop got used maybe 3 times, tops.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 6th 2008 10:54AM]

hey me, i think it's just the netbooks that are losing the optical drives, at least for now.. I still use my optical drive all the time!

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 6th 2008 1:03AM]

I just want to have OSX on a netbook. With everything (wifi) working. And preferably on a Mac.

[roach Posted Jul 6th 2008 11:59AM]

I wouldn't do that...not for writing recognition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCHqMENtKkA

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 6th 2008 6:34PM]

@roach
Thanks for the link. Wow, just wow! If the M912V can do this I might just hold off until this comes out.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 6th 2008 6:38PM]

@roach
Thanks for the link. Wow, just wow! If the M912V can do this I might just hold off until this comes out.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 6th 2008 2:09PM]

I'm a current user of the Fujitsu lifebook convertible series and this is a nice upgrade at ! half the price. I consider that a nice step forward.

Only downside is the company's product page makes no mention of memory options. Sounds like 1GB is the only option. Anyone know different?

[gerrrg Posted Jul 7th 2008 12:39AM]

what a joke. the number of cores has nothing to do with a computer crashing.

[foyleman Posted Jul 8th 2008 1:49PM]

Does the release date of "this month" mean in the states or the unspecific "somewhere in the world"?

[substance90 Posted Jul 21st 2008 4:29AM]

What about one of the most important factors: battery life?

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 20th 2008 5:12AM]

I've been hovering about, thinking about getting a netbook/umpc for a while and when I saw this dish I got really excited! The new cheap Dell netbooks seemed interesting, but the swivel tablet thing (for me) is worth the extra money. Like others have said, it's like a Fujitsu at half the price!

And then (cry)... after a model search on google I found out that it won't be released to the US/Canada market (of which I am the Canadian part).

DERKA!

Can we make some sort of petition? I'll pay for the domain name and hosting, seriously. If it would really change their mind that is.

This this is the best (right now haha) of all ultra-mobile worlds as far as I can tell.

Any replies?

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 19th 2008 1:32AM]

If this was a month ago I would snap this up in a second.. unfortunately I have seen 8.9 in person and realize that for ME I can not go lower than a 10"

If the could possibly come up with a 10" version for less than an extra $50

Hopefully they DO have a 10" in the works and you can also strip down the O/S to save even more money.. heck go to 10 drop to linux = breaking even (ok just drooling now)