It’s been a long time coming but LG finally sent us a notebook to test. The P1 Pro is a 15.4in mid-range notebook which dips its feet into most notebook arenas, doesn’t excel at anything, but keeps the price down.
It’s stylish and well built with a stiff blue lid, cream keyboard and silver chassis. The screen offers a resolution of only 1280 x 800 (lower than competitors) but it’s crisp, bright and well-lit. The glossy coating will bother some people with reflections though it enhances colours in return. Our HD test movies looked very good though and lag was impressively minimal. Horizontal viewing angles are impressive but vertical ones are average.
LG makes a big noise regarding the P1’s audio capabilities. A line in port (which doubles as S/PDIF) joins the standard two headphone and mic jacks. A dedicated button toggles between SRS audio enhancement modes although few people will be bothered by the minor differences these make. The speakers themselves get quite loud but don’t offer much bass. Another over-trumpeted feature is the Direct Media button. This either launches Media Player or, if the notebook is off, boots into Windows and launches Media Player wow.
We were very impressed with the keyboard which is full-sized, crisp and very comfortable to type on. LG even squishes a separate number pad. The trackpad is comfy too and we’d be very happy to work on the P1 all day.
Under the hood, LG uses a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 with 1GB of RAM and a decent 120GB hard disk. This scored 0.91 in our benchmarks, a little lower than we expected but still capable of grinding through some hardcore encoding.
3D graphics come courtesy of ATI’s Mobility Radeon X1400 chip. However, averaging only 20fps in our low-end 1024 x 768 tests in both Far Cry and Call of Duty 2 is poor. You’ll have to drop details if you want to play recent games.
Other features include a dual-layer DVD-RAM writer, 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2 and Gigabit Ethernet. There’s an ExpressCard/54 slot and D-SUB and S-Video for video out. Confusingly, despite LG shouting about its entertainment features, Vista Business Edition is installed and there’s a fingerprint reader and TPM too. We’d have rather seen a Vista version with Media Center embedded.
Portability is pretty. You won’t want to carry its 2.8kg bulk around all day but battery life scores of 2hrs 39mins under intensive use and 3hrs 28mins under light use aren’t bad for its size.
It all amounts to a good, if not great notebook. The problem is the A-Listed Asus A8JP offers better 2D and 3D grunt, DVI output, a high-res screen and better (2yrs C&R) warranty.
