X-bit labs

Portable Gamer’s Dream: Asus G2 Gaming Notebook Series Review (page 6)

Category: Mobile

by Alexander Britvin

[ 06/01/2007 | 11:15 AM ]

You can spot an interesting device above the top left corner of the keyboard. It is an additional OLED display that can be programmed to report the user a lot of useful information during the game process. The OLED display shows the current time, outputs various notifications, informs you about new letters in your MS Outlook inbox or about a call from MS Messenger or Power4Phone, and warns about low battery charge (when it is below 10%). By default, the display shows a clock icon:

You can create a creeping line with your own text or use one of the standard display icons or disable this display altogether. The display is controlled with the ASUS Direct Console. You can change your Personal Setting there.

The touchpad of the ASUS G2Pb is unusual, like the rest of this notebook. The wide touch-sensitive panel is surrounded with an aluminum bezel and is sunken a little below the surface level. The surrounding plastic has a decorative pattern but no gloss. The two touchpad buttons complement the bezel and merge into the aluminum hand-rest.

Nestled between the buttons is a touchpad activity indicator with the gaming series’ logo and red (green for the G1) highlighting.

The touchpad lacks a dedicated scrolling zone or a scrolling joystick, but you can browse pages using the right and bottom parts of the touch-sensitive panel.

The G2Pb being positioned as a gaming solution, it is natural it offers an abundance of various ports and connectors on each side panel.

The left side of the notebook offers the following components (from left to right):

• LAN port (RJ-45)
• Modem port (RJ-11)
• USB 2.0 port
• AV/S-Video input for connecting to video/audio sources via RCA and S-Video connectors
• Antenna input (to connect an external antenna or cable TV)
• Audio input
• Microphone input
• Digital S/PDIF output combined with a headphones output
• 4-pin IEEE1394 port (FireWire) marked as DV meaning that it can be used to connect high-end digital video equipment
• Wireless LAN switch you enable/disable the WLAN interface with
• 26-pin ExpressCard/54 connector

• 4-in-1 card-reader (supported formats: Memory Stick/Memory Stick Pro/MultiMedia Card/Secure Digital)
• IrDA port