Product Listing

Gigabyte M912 Netbook - Touch Friendly

By Aloysius Low - 8 Aug 2008

Battery Life and Portability Index

Battery Life

As with most other netbooks, the lack of an optical drive only means that we continue to use our same high-def video looping test running on the hard disk. This makes sense of course, as most of the video watching done will be done via the hard disk since no optical drive is available. We've also turned off power hungry features like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, since you don't really need to watch videos with those turned on. We also tweaked the power settings to ensure the unit doesn't turn off halfway to save power and set brightness and volume to 50%, as per our normal settings.

The two hours of playback that we managed to obtain was nothing fantastic to say the least. In fact, it lasted only just four minutes longer than the Acer Aspire One, which was using a puny 3-cell 2200mAH battery. Not a good sign, in our opinion. After some quick calculations based on the uptime of the Gigabyte netbook and the battery specifications, strangely we found the M912 was sucking up a lot more juice than other comparative netbooks despite using the same hardware platform. While it wasn't as much as the power hogging HP Mini-Note, it was even more than the MSI Wind, which was using a larger 10-inch screen and a similar standard HDD. We suspect this could be due to the combination of Windows Vista and the touchscreen, though we can't be totally certain until we get our hands on more netbooks that run Vista.

Portability Index

The Gigabyte M912 didn't fare too well for our portability index either, scoring the lowest we've ever seen so far for a netbook, which is not quite surprising given that we were expecting something along those lines (but not as low as calculated). While the scores may be low, do keep in mind that this is still much better than most normal notebooks that we've come across; so as far as general portability is concerned, it's still hanging in decently. After all it's still only 1.3kg and its overall form factor is small, which means it's not really that much of a burden to lug it around as much as a heavier and larger standard notebook.

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