Gigabyte U2442N and U2442V Ultrabooks Inbound

Gigabyte finally has two ultrabooks to its name, the U2442N and U2442V, whose time of arrival and prices are completely unknown even now. 

The company introduced them just a short time ago in Hannover, Germany, having secured a spot at this year's CeBIT show (2012). 

Like all ultrabooks, they are very thin mobile personal computers whose performance is higher than that of netbooks but lower than or equal to that of actual notebooks. 

The U2442N is what one might call the stronger of the two, putting more emphasis on performance that energy conservation. 

As such, it uses standard voltage central processing units from the Intel Core i5 and Core i7 lines. 

Storage space is provided by either a solid state drive (SSD) or an HDD (hard disk drive), depending on what customers value more between speed and capacity. Either way, the maximum number of gigabytes is 750. 

Furthermore, Gigabyte tossed in USB 3.0 support, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi and an optional Thunderbolt port, plus a backlit keyboard. 

The U2442V, as the less performance-focused, makes do with ULV (ultra-low voltage) CPUs from the Core i5 and Core i7 lines. The rest of the specs are practically the same. 

Gigabyte chose to make its ultrabooks slightly larger than competing devices: the screens have a diagonal of 14 inches instead of 13.3. 

The native resolution is of 1,600 x 900 pixels, not exactly Full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) but better than HD (1,366 x 768 pixels). 

Unfortunately, Gigabyte did not say how long the U2442N and U2442V are supposed to last on a single battery charge. 

As such, we can't tell if the battery lifespan advantage of the U2442V is worth the performance sacrifices. Pricing hasn't been finalized either, so we'll have to wait for sales to start, something that will happen in Q2, 2012 (April-June).

Posted in: Hardware, Preview