LG P300

Friday, October 03, 2008

The upcoming notebook from LG -P300 wears a unique lid design which drew mixed reactions. The notebook wears an unusual cool look and its design hides away all the fingerprint marks and scratches on the glossy top. The brushed metallic finish palmrest adds to its stylish look. The track pad works great, and it features VGA as well as HDMI out. The sound output of the speakers is unbelievably loud and clear compared to some of the other LG notebooks.

The premium config notebook performed excellent in our usual benchmark tests such as, 3Dmark06 and PCMark05, it scored excellent with 1672 and 4968 respectively. In BatteryMark, we got 2 hours 36 minutes on a full charge -better than many notebooks of this size and weight. It comes preloaded with Windows Vista Home Premium. I love the LG smart indicator on the Vista sidebar which displayed battery life, brightness, volume level and network status. It also features Bluetooth, 1.3Mp webcam and LG's Smartlink port which allows the notebook to be directly connected to another notebook/desktop.

Apart from the colored stripes, the glossy nature of the lid made it prone to scratches & fingerprints. Secondly, it gets uncomfortably hot on the lap after a couple of hours of use. To make the notebook this sleek and lightweight, LG decided to provide an external optical drive rather than integrating one in the notebook. The 1.6Kg weight does not justify this though.

I think, the P300 offers direct competition to Dell XPS M1330 and it manages to beat Dell's performance too (at the same price for a similar specification).

Bottom line: The notebook outperforms Dell XPS 1330, but the absence of optical drive does not justify its weight.

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