Gigabyte Wireless Presentation Kit

First Look

Gigabyte Wireless Presentation Kit is a product that enables you to control your PC remotely through wireless connection, specially designed to control PowerPoint, which is one of the most famous softwares to make presentations. This product is also known as GM-FPB, its product code.

Contrary to other competitor kits available at the market, Gigabyte’s model is wireless, not infrared. Thus you don’t need to point the unit directly to the receptor installed on your computer: the aim doesn’t depend to where you point the unit.

The kit consists in two pieces: a remote control, with mouse, laser pointer and buttons for controlling PowerPoint or Media Player; and a receiving USB antenna, which has a 128 MB or 256 MB flash memory embedded.

Figure 1: Gigabyte kit on its original package.

The kit comes in a beautiful and useful hard covered box, as you can see at Figure 2.

Figure 2: Gigabyte kit in its box.

Figure 3: Pieces from the kit (mouse and antenna).

This kit is extremely convenient. You can simply record your presentation on its flash memory, so you don’t need to carry a CD-ROM nor a notebook containing your presentations anymore. Just plug in the antenna on the USB port of the computer available at your lecture site and presto!

In Figure 4 we see the receiveing antenna with flash memory (128 MB on the model we got for reviewing). There is a button on its top to force the antenna changing its transmitting channel. This has to be use if you face severe interference (other devices using the same channel). On its side there is an interruptor to enable/disable writting to the flash memory.

Figure 4: Receiveing antenna/flash memory.

We can see the mouse in Figure 5. On its top part near an yellow triangule you will find the laser pointer button (which doesn’t depend on the kit to be connected to a PC to be used). The big round pad is the mouse itself, with the two mouse buttons just beneath it. The transparent button just below the mouse buttons is a mode switch button: you can switch the unit between PowerPoint and Media Player functions. When the unit is in Media Player mode, this button glows in green and the buttons of the unit assume other function: the right button function changes to stop and the left button function changes to play/pause.

On the unit side you will find, from left to right, the on/off switch of the unit, a button that, when the unit is in PowerPoint mode equals to the Esc key and when the unit is in Media Player mode means “next track”, the next button means full screen or opens the Media Player and, at last, the function the most called our attention, a knob that calls the next or the previous slide depending on the direction you turn it, being the button that we used the most during or practical tests with this unit, as will will discuss later. Pressing this knob the function “drag” is activated. In Media Player mode, this knob controls your PC volume and, pressing it, the “mute” function is activated.