February 13th, 2008Review of LG Xnote C1 Tablet
It has been some time since we had the enjoyment of review a Tablet PC. In fact looking at the functionality and expediency that tablets offer, it makes us doubt why producer keep ignoring this segment of mobile computing. Very few manufacturers tend to release products in this range in India and when they do… the machines end up being sub-par and extremely luxurious to boot. LG recently free their Xnote C1 tablet. Is it able to flee the problems that have overwhelmed other players in this segment?
LG as a brand-name is far improved known in India for their white good products. Though they have marketed and released laptops in India previous too, they have not been able to get any kind of success in this sphere. Hence coming into this review, I was a small bit curious and wary on the looks and presentation of this new product.
Well my fears on the looks of the manufactured goods were laid to rest rather quickly. The X1 is a 10.6 inch tablet and is amazingly small and light. LG has opted to go with a plain white-black color grouping for the Xnote. There is a strange color difference here though. The top lid of the tablet is piano-black with a smooth finish, while the district around the LCD Panel is a lighter matte finish and the keyboard area is plain glossy white. The whole effect gives the tablet a rather sober look and actually demeans the laptop - making it look less luxurious than it is in fact worth. Another exasperating note here is that the top lid is a fingerprint magnet. Every little thumb print shows up glaringly. In its defense however, LG has provided a cloth to clean the laptop. While this does solve the problem somewhat, a better selection of paint and a less deep outside (like HP’s DV2000 series) would have been more suitable. However once you get past this problem, the LG shines. The construction material used for the tablet is very sturdy. The hinges of the tablet are well secured and despite being flexed in every likely direction was free moving and without squeaks.
The keyboard of the tablet was one of the many surprises that we found in this manufactured goods. Unlike standard keyboards offered on tablets of this size, the X1’s has surprisingly large keys, excellent assignment and great tactile feedback. The normal cramping that one faces when typing on a tablet’s keyboard, was thankfully and conspicuously not present. In a similar vein the touch pad too was top-notch. It offers very good grip and a pair of astonishingly firm mouse keys.
The LCD panel on the C1 is a 10.6†affair with a native wide screen resolution of 1280×768. This is a good resolution as it offers a decent amount of screen space to work with. One interesting point to note here is that unlike the ultra-bright screens that normal ultra-portables offer, the screen on the C1 is quite diffused and has very average color/contrast levels. I don’t know if this is due to the fact that it’s a touch screen other than it’s definitely a cause for concern. When you are by it as a tablet, even at maximum brightness reading the screen can from time to time get tricky and one has to strain their eyes. The screen unlike additional producer does not offer an awfully precise degree of control. The stylus of the C1 is stored on the left side of the screen. It has a pop-up action that slides it out of the holder.
Connectivity wise the tablet is quite loaded. It offers 3 USB slots, 1 VGA slot, 1 Microphone/Headphone slot and a 5 in 1 card reader. In a surprising move, it also offers an SRS HD slider, which enables the laptop to output simulated enclose sound for headphone/speaker use. In terms of wireless connectivity the laptop offers 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The tablet due to its nature does not offer an integrated ODD. LG instead offers a very sleek and compact external DVD-RAM drive.
The LG C1 is built on the now aging Intel Core Duo platform. It utilizes a low-voltage U2500 processor which is clocked at 1.2 GHz, comes with an Nvidia 7300 graphics chipset, has 1 GB of system RAM and an 80 GB HDD. These specifications may seem ancient by comparison to other laptops but please remember; this is a tablet and serves a different master. The computer is a very good choice as it is very power efficient and still offers the recital of a mid-level performer. The only thing I have against it is the 1 GB of RAM and paltry 80 GB of space. The reason for this is Windows Vista. Vista is pretty resource hungry and requires at least 2 GB of system recollection if one wants to multi-task with a sensible degree of comfort.
For evaluating the performance of this tablet, we have divided our results into four sections. The first two sections are strictly synthetic tests i.e. PCmark 05 and 3DMark 06, the next test was battery life under real life conditions and finally a strict user based evaluation how usable the tablet is actually.
The results? Extremely good… PCmark05 gave us an average score of 2453. Here I ran into a problem… i.e. I had no actual real test score of a previous product to compare this to. To overcome this problem I simply referred the online ORB database, which has a listing of comparative scores of other products. The result was quite surprising. The score of the C1 was quite a bit on the higher side as compared to similar tablets. The 3dMark06 score of 741 in the same vein was also very inspiring. In fact the C1 was among the only notebooks, to even have a 3d solution like the Nvidia 7300. Most tablets with similar configurations use the Intel GMA 950 chipset. When you add these things… the universal performance of the C1 are pretty good as contrast to the opposition such as Toshiba and others.
