Gigabyte TouchNote clone shows up in China

100 see ban gu

It’s starting to seem like immutable law that if a company releases an innovative product, a Chinese company is going to produce a knockoff within a few months. And hot on the heels of the Gigabyte TouchNote T1028, a Chinese company has launched the 100 See Ban Gu which seems like a pretty obvious ripoff.

The knockoff features a 10.2 inch touchscreen display that can be folded down over the keyboard for use in tablet mode. And like the Gigabyte TouchNote, it has a thn touchpad with buttons on the left and right sides instead of below.

The laptop doesn’t look quite as polished as the TouchNote, but it will probably be a lot cheaper. Gigabyte’s touchscreen netbooks run as high as $699 in the US, although that’s the price for a model with a 1366 x 768 pixel display and 3G modem. No word on whether the 100 See Ban Gu will sport either of those features.

What the Chinese knockoff does have is your usual netbook specs including a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive.


Posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009, 4:29 pm by Brad
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  • jake
    China is full of brainless copycats. Certainly there must be some diamonds in the rough but when blatant ripoffs such as this are allowed to exist without reprimand, it says a lot about the ethics and core values of China and its people.
  • Giles
    @jake. Thats a bit rough, don't you think. You should remember that probably 20% of the worlds population live in China. If you consider how many people in this world have low ethical values it follows that a large proportion of them live in China. You can hardly write of the whole country for that
  • Well, they might argue that it says a lot about U.S. laptop vendors that they outsource design details to ODMs in Taiwan and manufacturing to plants in China instead of making them themselves.

    The ODMs and OEMs are almost never the same company. The manufacturers specialize in building stuff, not in coming up with new designs. So when someone else makes something interesting and there isn't any patent protection or anything, they learn from it and start making something similar. It's at a lot lower cost, because the branded vendor and the ODM don't get a cut.

    So really, they're innovating just by building a product that didn't go through an ODM first and come to their door with a full spec. Who knows, by learning how to do this, some of these OEMs may move up the food chain and become ODMs in a few years, just as ODMs like Asus and MSI have started building their brands for end users.
  • Same comments made about Taiwan a decade ago, Korea and Japan preceding. And now Taiwan products are innovative?
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