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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).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.
Figure 5: Wireless mouse.
Figure 6: Side view of the wireless mouse. Pay attention to the rounded knob near my thumb that commands the slideshow.
Figure 7: Laser pointer in action.Our Tests
Instead of lab test, we decided to test this kit in a practical environment. We brought this kit with us to an eight-hour workshop we gave. The kit exceed our expectations. Its range was outstanding: we could control the presentation even on the opposite side of the auditorium – a 600-people site.
From all available functions, the one that we found more convinient was the rounded knob for controlling the next/previous slide on PowerPoint. This is a really amazing feature. The integrated laser pointer is another hot feature from this kit, because we didn’t need to carry two pieces on our hands at the same time.
The fact of being wireless and not infrared is really awesome. Even faced back to our computer we could control the presentation, not distracting our audience, which is very common to happen if you need to stop the presentation every 2 minutes or so to change the slide.
In our next workshop/lecture we won’t carry our notebook anymore: we will record the PowerPoint file in the memory of the unit and we will use the PC available at the facilities. No extra weight in our luggage anymore.
The mouse of this unit is also very unique. It is sensible to the pressure you give to it. If you press it with more strenght, the mouse cursor moves faster, while it will move slower if you don’t push the pad too hard.
During the eight hours of our workshop we didn’t face any trouble with the unit and its batteries kept running if they were brand new at the end of the day.
On the previous day, however, we tested the kit on an one-hour lecture and the kit stopped working. To solve this problem we just unplugged it from the USB port and plugged it again. This was the only problem we had with this unit.
Conclusions
The Wireless Presentation Kit from Gigabyte is really convenient and will please both the user that makes a lot of PowerPoint presentations and companies that lease products for presentations (belive in us, this kit is worthwhile buying). Besides its countless features not present in other units, it is wireless, feature that gives you freedom to not point the unit to the receptor. Simply addictive, this is our newest official co-star in all our presentation from now on.
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