Got my LG LM50 : D [review]

I got it! Was shipped yesterday and arrived today around noon.. So i've had time to poke around a bit and get rid of windows... Gentoo is now happily installing, so I'll write a little write-up-thingie.

I don't have a digital camera right now, but i'll get some pics.. Eventually I will put up a site about the LM50 and Linux and submit it to Tuxmobile and similar sites for any other linux users who are curious, but I will also post them here.

First things first, if you are looking at buying an LG, buy it from Online Electronics Inc. They are based in Ontario, but from what I understand they do or will soon sell to the states. (As a side note, LG will be coming to the US in the next 3-4 months.. their non-competitive with IBM nearing it's end).

The guys at Online Electronics Inc. (http://onlineelectronicsinc.com/) were absolutly great while I was looking into this. They did everything from installing linux on a notebook to test for me (couldnt find any info if it worked or not), promising no-dead pixels, to passing on several price drops from LG to me and saving me a couple hundred bucks - after I was already buying the notebook. They went the extra mile, and were great to deal with. I think this is important when spending the kind of cash notebooks cost these days. Ask for Jeff! They are putting up pricelist stuff soonish, right now their site doesn't have info on the LG's, but you can contact them for pricing.


Anyway, on to the notebook. It arrived and as promised, no dead pixels. Beautifull screen.. at least as bright as the sony Xbrite, but without the shiny reflective screen. it's a 200 nitt screen, for those keeping track. Very crisp - probably due to the SXVGA+ (1040x1500... sooo nice), and very vibrant colors, they just jump right out. I actually turned the screen brightness down while using the notebook in low-light conditions because it was so bright. the screen has 8 brightness settings.

My only initial concern here was that 1040x1500 would be too high a res for a 15", but those concerns were dissolved when I saw it - it's perfect. No eye strain at all, just seems right. Viewing angle is good also, haven't had any problems with this at all.


Keyboard - this is an important one to me, since i'm a programmer and I type a lot - and the keyboard is also great. Nice feel to the keys, sturdy and full sized keys, well spaced. page up/down buttons are their own buttons, not needing Function, and surprisingly it took no getting used to at all - I find I am able to just type without any more thought than on my desktop, with the small exception of the left ctrl. button (function button is far bottom left, ctrl is to the right - but i think this is fairly standard). I stumbled a couple times on that, but it became normal very quickly.

The only buttons on the notebook other than the keyboard buttons is a power button and a dedicated volume up/down (pushing both at the same time is mute). This leads into the look of the laptop, which follows the same concept - clean, no clutter or glitz anywhere. It won the IF Design Award, and it's easy to see why. It's a nice silver with a black keyboard. There is a slight piano black accent around the top lid which makes it look fairly slick when closed, but other than that it's very simple. It's perfect. Very nice looking unit, had a few people at work walking around saying "damn, i want to sell my notebook and get one of those", and they were were only half-joking.

The hardware itself is all high quality components, I'd list it all off but it's in the middle of installing Gentoo From poking through the pc info in windows though, every peice of interal hardware is high quality. No low grade stuff in here that i could find. For ports it has 3 USB 2.0 ports - 2 on the left front, and one on the right rear (the single one for the mouse). There is a hidden drawer which opens to reveal a plug for an external monitor and a parallel port, s-video on the back, and on the right/front there is a firewire port, SD Memory card slot, and a pcmia slot. All the plugs seem very well positioned. Power, modem and ethernet are located on the back as well. The wireless b/g is a mini pci card - It's built into the notebook, so it's not something you can access easily, but i would assume that with a screwdriver you could pop it out and upgrade once the next wireless band comes along.

Above the keyboard is where all the indicator lights are, but you can't really see them unless they are enabled. I'm not going to bother listing these off, as I assume the functionality of these lights doesn't change much, but they are green and not obtrusive. The speakers are front and center and create a interestingly designed vent shape on the front of the notebook. You can probably find some pics on http://spirit.lg.ca/xnote/


Touchpad is simple, a synaptics touchpad with 2 buttons - no scrollwheel, but of course you don't need it, you can scroll with your finger on the pad. Anyone who's used a synaptics touchpad will be familiar with the software, it let's you setup all kinds of crazy stuff.

Sound is nothing to write home about, but it's pretty good for a laptop. You can get some pretty decent volume out of it, but as expect the bass isn't that great - and with grungy music it can distort at higher volumes. (playing with the graphic equilizer in my media player was able to mostly resolve that, though)


It's a titanium/carbon fiber alloy, so it's fairly light for a 15" - 2.2kg (4.8 lbs) with the 6 cell / 6 hour battery. I got the 9 cell / 10 hour battery so it's a bit heavier, but it still seems light. It's definitly a "thin and light". As for thin, it's about an inch tall closed... Just slightly thicker than my friends powerbook, mostly because of the feet (which are not removable, they are part of the case).

The cooling system in this notebook is primarily heat piping. There are 3 ACPI fans, but they are very quiet. Apperantly they are able to keep the fan speed and usage (and noise) down because of the heat piping. The notebook does get fairly warm, it seems like some of the heat is actually released through the keyboard like a mac powerbook, but it's perfectly comfortable to place on your lap while using. [edit] my initial fairly warm observations where while it was grinding away at 100% cpu usage for hours, compiling things.. under normal usage it doesn't get 'fairly warm', and even that wasn't bad


Battery life as I mentioned depends on the battery, you can get a 6 or 9 cell (9 cell sticks out a small bit, but it doesn't get in the way or look bad, so it's worth it) - LG claims 6 hours on the 6 cell and 10- hours on the 9 cell... Bold claims, to be sure. After a full charge, i unplugged it and let it sit for a bit, Windows informed me I had 12 hours batter life left - unplugging it drops the screen brightness to about half, after cranking it up to full brightness and leaving it for awhile the battery life ETA dropped to about 6 hours.

What this means in the real world, I'm not entirely sure, but I'll find out soon enough - in any case, it looks like it's going to live up to it's claim of incredibly long battery life, even if it doesn't pull a full 10 hours of usage. Once I get stuff setup, maybe I'll do some testing and post the results. [edit] I'm able to get about 5-8 hours out of the battery in linux, depending on usage and such.

Hmm.. Not sure what else to mention, I haven't done any benchmarks or anything - but it's very fast, very responsive. It's a 1.7ghz (745 Dothan) centrino, and i got the 80gb drive - specs are here:
http://spirit.lg.ca/xnote/model.asp?selected=lm50

It came with a bunch of software and of course the quick restore cd, all of which remains in the box (it's windows software, I'm not running windows). There are no partitions on the drive for any wierd system tools or whatnot... Umm.. it came with a miniature usb/optical mouse, the charger/ac adaptor is nice and small/light, just a little black box and a cable.

Ah yes, the Warranty - The LM50 comes with a 3 year warranty. I was not offered any "extended" warranty - the base warranty from LG just covers it all, so there is no need for such things. I didn't even hav e to send the warranty card back to LG to register for the warranty like I had to with my old fujitsu, I just have a peice of paper that you are susposed to write your serial # on and keep - you just send it, with the notebook, if something breaks. Maybe this is how it's normally done these days, but it wasn't last time I had a notebook, so this was all very cool for me


So, the bad?

Well, i can't really say i've found much bad yet - the only thing i can think of that they could really do would be to up the HD speed. I think it's 4200. I honestly haven't noticed any speed issues, at all, but that's something they could speed up anyway

[edit] I've found that the wifi detection won't work in linux yet, still working on it.. for windows users there won't be any problems. Basically what it is is three hidden blue leds on the outside/top cover which come on when there is a wireless signal picked up - makes it easy to tell when you are near a hotspot (or somebody who has an open wifi connection)

I'll have to get some pictures, and if I stumble into any other problems or negatives, I'll update this post with them.

 

Google was kind enough to share these pictures that somebody else took of the LM 50

I put them on my computer because it was a .pl site and very slow

http://thalassa.jerrett.net/pictures.php?view=lm50

If i can find a camera I'll take some more, but those are some pretty decent pictures

 

Nice take. I wouldn't mind seeing more of LG in the US.

Editor in Chief http://www.bargainPDA.com and http://www.SPOTstop.com

 

I think LG nbooks provide good quality,I see its screen quality,
it s as same as Amilo M 1420,but here Turkey it s more expensive than Fujitsu...its price LM 50 1,8 dathon,512 ram,9600ati 64mb and Turkey market price 2600 usd.Overpriced.I think this one is better than lg50 and its price
MSI L510
CPU : 1,5 dathon
RAM :512 mb 266
Yazma Sistemi
VGA:9700 64mb
15,1 sxga
CDRW
40 gb 5400rpm
Turkey market price: 1620 usd

and Packard Bell
DOTHAN 1.6
512MB
DVDWR (+ -)
RADEON 9600 64
15.4 WXGA1280*800
80 GB 4200
SUPERIOR DIAMONT VIEW,ULTRA BRIGHT GLARE SCREEN
Turkey price:2200usd


                            </img>

 

Gratz on ur purchase. I have the same one, no complaints so far.

 

ennoia, thanks for your review of the LM50, this is a great take and keep us posted on how it goes!

 

Great to here your happy thanks again for the purchase.

I will be posting a lot of pictures on Monday I will update you.
I am also working on LG_Man to join the forum so we can have an LG rep present from Canada.

Jeff Wood
Owner
Online Electronics Inc
www.lgstore.ca

 

I was wondering if the AC adapter plug is anything similar to any other laptop brands. I'm contemplating buying a LM40, but need my Targus auto/air adapter to work with it. Unfortunately they don't list an appropriate power tip that will work with LG laptops, so I'm hoping someone here would recognize the plug, so I can cross reference it to an existing laptop's tip in the database. Seems that the Targus auto/air adapter has the correct output voltage and capacity to make this work.

I saw a LS50 at the store last night. *Very* impressive laptop! [ ]

 

ac adapter output: 18.5v 3.5a




--
LG LM50 / Dothan 745
jerrett.net

 

hi ennoia

just curious how much did u get ur lg note book for?



this is pretty much the perfect one im looking for..
Except the acer 3200xi (or something like that) still has the better video card

u think the LG will run HL2?

lets see some pics!

thanks
-nathan

 

The LM50 is around $3,000 cdn, for the "fully loaded" (best configuration) .. the LS50 is more in the $2k range. You can probably get a full price list of all confugrations if you ask the guys at http://onlineelectronicsinc.com/


I duno if it will run half-life 2 or not ;]

if you scroll to the bottom of this page:
http://www.hardware.com.pt/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3295


there are a bunch of pictures listed.. I still haven't taken pictures of mine, but it looks exactly the same ;]

--
LG LM50 / Dothan 745
jerrett.net

 

Thanks.

3,000 is pretty pricy.. but i do want the ati 9600..

sigh still debating between this one and the acer 3201xci

-nathan

 

the LS50 and LM40 come with the 9200 , i just checked and the LM50 models that have the 9600 are all in ther $2900+ range.. they drop to the $2500 range with the 9200

Another thing to keep in mind is that the LM50's all come with a full 3 year warranty from LG.. you don't have to buy "Extended warranties", which usually run a couple hundred dollars

They have their site updated with proper pricing now:
http://www.lgstore.ca/catalog/index.php?cPath=25&sort=2a&filter_id=11

--
LG LM50 / Dothan 745
jerrett.net

 

To be honest I would have gone LG if it had a) 7200 rpm hard drives b) thinkvantage features of ibm

 

nice

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