February 13th, 2008Review of LG Xnote R200
When one believes of laptops, LG is not a company that immediately leaps to mind. Its brand attendance is much modest in this area, with releases being few and far between. However, this does not mean the company lacks good products… it’s just that brand visibility is close to zero due to inadequate information. Looking to overcome this problem, LG has of late been advertising one of its laptops (the ultra portable R200 Xnote) quite vigorously. This is the product we shall review today.
The R200 is the kind of laptop that you’ll either fall in love with or hate at first sight. This is simply due to the polished-mirrored come to an end that LG has adopted. It consists of a glossy piano black finish for the lid, diffused white for the keyboard area, and a dark matte for the area around the LCD panel. While I thought it looked a bit tacky, chiefly the lid area, most people were quite frightened and found it sharp and elegant. Let’s just chalk this up to the YMMV (your mileage may vary) syndrome and move on.
While the color scheme may be good-looking to some, the physical design of the laptop is certainly not one of its strong points. It has a fairly bulky and boxy profile, and is fairly heavy due to the thick plastic used. While it does appear sturdy, the weight and size is a turn-off. Another thing that can get a little frustrating is the reflect finish of the lid, which attracts dust and fingerprints.
The top houses the Windows sideshow LCD panel. Around it there are a variety of buttons. While the middle sections functions as a D-pad, there are three buttons (of which two do duty as ‘power’ and ‘menu’). The display screen is very bright, but astonishingly consumes little power. The screen is capable of displaying about nine lines of text.
Gadget- or widget-wise the LCD panel is quite strapped. It offers just a power indicator, a music/photo gallery app, and the non-payment sideshow player, along with a solitaire game. The range of applications can easily be expanded, however, via the control panel. This is a plus point.
The LCD panel is a 12.1 inch affair with a native resolution of 1280×800. The screen overall is very average, as it offers below-par color/contrast ratios and unimpressive brightness levels. The upside is that it does not consume too much power.
The keyboard is top-notch. It offers excellent typing comfort via its beautifully positioned and elevated keys. The mouse pointer is also outstanding and offers great grip and a comfortable working area. Connectivity wise the laptop is quite good. It offers 3 USB slots, a 5-in-1 card reader, a dual-layer DVD-RW and Fire wire. Check out this link for a full condition list. For testing the presentation of the X200, we first ran the usual series of benchmarks such as PCMark 2005/ 3DMark 2006 and in our second round we did real-time battery life tests. The results were as follows:
The R200 is a 12.1 inch laptop that’s powered by a T7300 processor (2.0 GHz). It has 1 GB of RAM, a 160 GB HDD, and a Radeon HD 2400 graphics chipset. These are not very powerful specs and this was proved in our tests. The score averaged was 2673 on PCMark 05 and around 950 (with a spike of 973) on 3DMark.
One area the laptop does extremely well in was the battery tests. Even with serious use it easily lasted over 3½ hrs. This kind of battery life improves the viability of the laptop a great deal. At the end of the day, the R200 is an odd product. It’s sturdily built and has a good battery life, but suffers in presentation and is rather expensive at Rs 79,000. At this price point there are several ultra portables obtainable, and with better specifications. We’d propose you look around before you make a decision.
