LG P100 first look review
Well I've had the machine for a couple of weeks now and so I've formed a few inital impressions.
The packageThe box it arrived in was a fairly plain two colour printed cardboard job that belied the stylish unit it contained. The Fujitus P1610's box leaves it for dead in looks but was only slightly smaller. The same can't be said for the unit though. I guess I've spent too much time in the 5 inch - 9 inch world but my first gut reaction was "Wow it's big." But of course it's comparative.
It's bigger than the P1610 although thinner and with the standard battery on versus the extended battery on the Fuji: it's lighter than the Fuji. I haven't weighed it but it feels like about 100 grams lighter.
Size and weightI laid it on top of my 12 inch Powerbook and it is roughly the same size, although much thinner.
But the Powerbook is 12inch and the P100 10inch (widescreen though). Don't get me wrong; this isn't an instant fail, I'm just noting that it's a bit larger than I guess I was expecting.
I fell in love with the form factor of the Libretto L series and have missed my L3 since I sold it. The U series Vaio's were a touch too small for a lot of my uses and the R400 was way too big.
The LG feels smaller though. Putting it on top of the 1610 (there's been some good work out there comparing the C1 to the 1510 and this is the same) it's similar width, depth but thinner. On the Powerbook it's the same width and depth but thinner. But when you use it away from both of those units it actually feels smaller. I think that's because it's so nicely built, nicely balanced and then thinness counts here in real world use.
It also feels lighter than the 1.25kg's it weighs. That said, when you put the extended battery on it changes the wight distribution significantly. Not only is the unit heavier but it becomes quite rear end heavy.Or in tablet mode very significantly weighted towards one side. With the standard battery it is very nicely balanced in both laptop and tablet mode. It's rather a striking change when you put the big battery on and I think that's because the big battery is o much bigger. More than twice the size and certaiunly more than twice the weight of the standard battery.
This may sound negative but it's relative I think. With the big battery on I tend to hold it by the battery in tablet mode and it makes for a nice solid point to hold it from. It also feels quite nice to hold it slate like resting across the forearm and holding the battery in your hand (I'm right handed but this could also work for lefties by rotating the screen a couple more times).With the standard battery in place the whole unit is nicely balanced and very light, I could hold this in tablet mode for an extended period of time and not feel it at all. It also looks a million bucks held this way with nothing sticking out.
ScreenThe screen is a passive digitiser and as per reviews I read about the C1 does indeed take a fair bit more pressure than the P1610. When I first started to ink on this screen I found it a bit disconcerting as it felt like it was dragging in an unnatural way across the surface. It actually felt like a fault. I found by pressing harder that this changed and it felt more natural. With probably half again as much pressure as the P1610 required the pen moves very fluidly across the screen and the inking experience is very good. The palm rejection technology works equally as well as the P1610 and I've had no issues at all with vectoring. The screen does not have the dotted grid or speckle that the fuji does and while a passive screen so requiring some sort of texture you have to look very closely to see any pattern: but it is there, just not nearly as bad as some machines. This doesn't worry me at all but I thought I'd mention it as there's some posts going around about such things. For the record it didn't bother me on the Fuji either.
The screen is crystal clear and very bright. In a normal room in daylight I can easily set it on minimum brightness (level 1 on a 1-9 scale) and easily read and see everything. This is a bonus to allow more battery life (more on that later) as you can have the screen turned right down a lot of the time. Cranked up to the top brightness I found almost too bright for the eyes at night in the loungeroom with just some side lighting. During the day in the office full brightness is incredible and the screen looks a million bucks.
I've never really had a screen that works that well outdoors in full daylight and this is no exception. On an overcast day outside if I angle it right and on full brightness I can see the screen OK. With full, direct sunlight it's very hard to see but OK if you get the angle right, i.e. have your reflection offer a dark point to view screen content on. My Powerbook with it's older technology is completely useless in this environment also. On a covered deck though on a normal sunlit day and on full brightness it's totally workable though. On a slightly overcast day it's superb.
Wireless, bluetooth, etc
The wireless antennaes must be something special because I've never had anything like this reception before!
Side by side in the office the powerbook and the Fuji pick up two access points. The P100 finds 5 and sometimes 6. Easily and with strong signals. I thought my street was beind the times in that I could only see three access points. The LG gets 7!
Bluetooth reception is fine as well and the connecting and disconnecting is easy. The LG smart indicator software makes it simple to turn one or both off too to save power. In fact the smart indicator panel which sits in the vista sidebar is very cool and allows easy access and display of common functions such as screen brightness, battery settings, wifi etc and is easy to use with the mouse or pen/finger.
Battery LifeLG supplies a standard 3 cell and the extended 6 cell battery with the retail unit.
The standard battery gives me a solid 2 hours of real world use. That's a normal day for me of using it, putting it to sleep 5-6 times or more, screen brightness sometimes being on half, sometimes on lowest and set to the battery miser setting of balanced. Wifi and bluetooth on and it automatically connects to my phone when it's near which is most of the time (this takes power I believe). I haven't done a day on the battery saver setting (nor the high performance for that matter) but I would expect this to change by 10% or so.
On my settings I have had probably 2.5 hours max but it'd be safe to say that somewhere between 2 hours and 2.15 would be what I'd expect to get. I have it set so that it doesn't hibernate until the battery gets to 3%.
The extended battery give significantly more. My display at the moment shows 83% and 3 hours 20 minutes. Balanced, lowest brightness, multi-tasking, full wifi and connected via bluetooth to my phone as we speak. I could certainly turn things off and tweak settings but I haven't needed to yet and it really doesn't suit my usage patterns that I'd need more, that's one of the reasons I wasn't scared by reviews of the C1 that mentioned this kind of battery life.
In my full review I might do some battery tests for it.
PerformanceThis thing does indeed fly. It's fast. 3.8 on the windows experience index and pretty high scores on the other measures. It feels fast and I rarely wait for things to happen. I turn it to high performance mode when I have it plugged in and it does seem to function like a desktop rather than a tiny laptop. Mind you I have the fan speed set to Cool which means maximum an it is quite noisy. On battery I set it to quiet and I can hardly hear it at all.The unit doesn't get hot and when I've worked it I can feel a warm spot on the bottom but not uncomfortable and not hottish like my powerbook.
I can run a DivX movie in VLC, have a couple of programs open and flip between them via the funky looking Vista desktop flip or whatever it's called with no lag and then video even keeps playing in the little window. This happens in alt tab as well which is cool. It can handle multi-tasing even between Adobe CS3 and Office with music playing in the background. As a matter of fact I keep all the Vista eye candy on since it doesn't seem to phase the P100 at all. I've recently turned off transparent windows though as I've been reading some posts about it being better for battery life and GPU, etc and it was one eye candy thing I think I can do without.
This machine is supposed to be more powerful than the R400 (one of the key reasons I bought it) and while in some ways it is I think the things Toshiba did with ground up development for the R400 as a Vista flagship have made a difference. Primarily in startup and resume from sleep as the R400 was/is the fastest laptop I've ever used in this respect. It came back from sleep almost instantly and even though the P100 is quick it doesn't come back from sleep anywhere near as fast. It's definately much faster than the P1610 though.
Ports and misc.I'm loving having a multi card reader slot. The P1610 had a pcmcia slot and a SD card slot and while I used the SD card slot the PCMCIA went begging. The slot on the P100 can handle SD, XD, Memory Stick and this workd very well with the digital cameras I have. One nice feature is that the SD card when inserted is flush inside the unit and also this happens with the memory stick which is three times as long as a SD card. The memory stick disappears inside and is flush which is a nice touch. I haven't actually used the compact flash slot yet as I don't have any. I use one of the new Sandisk 4GB high speed USB plus cards which is an SD card but snaps in half to expose a usb plug so you can plug it into any computer with a USB slot. This is cool because it just sits in my machine all day and I can backup important things to it and also it doubles as my thumb drive since I can use it in any computer including the Mac's in the office.
Having 3 USB ports is cool too and it's a well thought out design as one port is on one side and two on the other. If i'm using a wired mouse I can plug it in and still have slots handy for thumb drives or hard drives or whatever.
It has a modem which I doubt I'll ever use and a Gigabit LAN which I haven't used yet but intend to. It's very nice to have and a lot of laptops still don't have this as standard.
I love having buttons on the screen bezel too as I use the page up and down buttons all the time in tablet mode. I wish they were lit as in dark rooms (night surfing :)) I find it tricky to find the right button but I'm thinking I might just stick a little glow in the dark sticker on the buttons.
LG has hardly any bloatware on the unit and I actually really like both the Smart Indicator and the Intelligent update which makes updating drivers very simlpe indeed.
I prefer touchpads on laptops and the LG one is a little smaller than other machines but works very well. It has vertical and horizontal scrolling and these work great too. While the P1610's IBM style stick was usable I don't miss it. I also find the keyboard is a great size and you can easily touch type at a fats rate on it although the keys do require a bit more of a hit than the R400's.
Style - the pros and cons
The machine looks really, really cool. Shiny piano black and clean crisp white. It's almost sexy. The P1610 looks positively bland next to it. But.....the blandness of the P1610 does make it usable. I felt no qualms about chucking the Fuji around and it didn't seem to pickup and scratches or anything. My P100 already has some little scratches on the cover and I notice them and it hurts. The thing looks so fine I almost feel like I have to keep it pristine and seriously this is wrong as this needs to be a daily driver for me. I don't know how I quite feel about this yet and I'm actually trying to get in the mindset that I will just use it and not care but we'll see how that goes. It shows up finger prints badly and actually so does the nice glossy screen. I find myself pulling out the micro fibre cleaning cloth 5 times a day which I never did with other computers. Not even the R400 although I did used to clean the top cover a bit; it just never seemed to need it as much.
Niggles/issuesI cannot get the screen auto rotate to work no matter what I do. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software/drivers, rolling back to previous drivers, installing old drivers manually and automatically, and nothing has worked so far.
The SD card reader wakes the unit from sleep when I insert a card even with the screen closed. I do this a bit as I might want to grab something from my desktopand so grab the USB plus card as it's replaced my thumbdrive. Then when I'm finished I reinsert it as that's where it lives 90% of the time and when I hear a beep and a clang I know that the P100 has been awake since I took the card out. I may be able to change some settings to fix this so it might be me to blame and not the unit.
Well that's about it for now, it turned out to be a bit longer than I thought. I'll upload some photo's when I've crunched them and write a full review once I've used the unit for a few months.
