The good: Attractive chassis design and color; integrated optical drive in a portable package; good connectivity feature set; good battery life.

The bad: Poor performance; no multimedia playback controls.

The bottom line: With its portable form factor and choice of pretty chassis colors, the LG LW25 Express will appeal to the fashion set who need an optical drive to show off their holiday photos. However, its lackluster performance means power users need not apply.

Read full review of the LG LW25 Express »

By Lee Ser Wei, CNET Asia
Nov 14, 2006

The LG LW25 is one of the class of ultraportables that takes advantage of the widescreen format. Always the limiting factor, the 12.1-inch LCD on the new aspect ratio leads to a laptop significantly smaller than a ream of A4 paper. Despite the diminutive size, the laptop manages to incorporate an optical drive under the hood.

	The LG LW25 Express comes in red or blue hues. (Click for larger image)

Design
In a move to attract the trendy user, LG has added color options for the lid of the machine. While not interchangeable, buyers can pick the navy blue or burgundy red. There is also a nice LED indicator for wireless activity, a thin blue line 2 inches long that lies at the bottom edge of the lid. The LW25, despite its form factor, possesses a 1.8-inch 60GB hard drive, albeit a slow 4,200rpm model, as well as a DVD-RW that supports DVD-RAM but not dual-layer.

On the other hand, the trackpad does not follow the size philosophy. It is small and framed by a plastic design trying to make it look bigger. The same frame is often mistaken for the scrolling edge, as it is flush with the trackpad and has a misleading groove.

Another issue involves the closing of the lid. As there is no catch, the spring tension of the hinge tends to slam the screen down when it is about 2 inches from the keyboard. It is advisable to be careful about this.

Features
The wireless coverage is excellent, on the level of a Toshiba, thanks to the Hexaband antenna which really shows a difference from vanilla designs. The ability to turn off the wireless capability at the touch of a hot key facilitates use on aircrafts. The presence of two LEDs indicate wireless activity, with one above the keyboard in the status panel and another on the edge of the lid.

Heading up the list of features is high-end Bluetooth 2.0 support based on the acclaimed Blue Soleil solution. Connectivity also includes an Agere Gigabit LAN connector. Rounding out the laundry list are the unpowered FireWire port, VGA and S-Video output, audio in and out jacks, ExpressCard/34 slot and three USB 2.0 jacks in two discreet locations on the side and rear of the laptop. A 5-in-1 memory card slot faces the user along the front edge of the machine, right between the two speakers. The latter pair deliver reasonable performance for their size.

Despite its diminutive size, it manages to integrate an optical drive under the hood. (Click for larger image)

The cinematic display is WXGA, delivering a fine balance of virtual screen estate and pixel density. However, its use of shiny, high-contrast glass which has had many Mac users up in arms also brings the same issues to this table. Under typical office lighting, the glass reflections are many and distracting, and under sun light, are more or less unusable despite being transflective. Viewing angle is good side to side but the lighting angle is quickly lost on the vertical axis. Once the environment is settled, the displays delivers a rich viewing experience that the older LCDs cannot match.

The laptop, though small, does not sacrifice the keyboard--in fact, it has a better keyboard than most. The keys are full-sized and possess good depth. The only thing going against the keyboard is the extreme skimping of button count, such as the placement of Delete and Insert onto the same key, the latter selectable via the Fn. This should discourage heavy Excel users, at the very least, who use the Insert key frequently.

Multimedia is a major selling point of the machine. The emphasis is reinforced by the inclusion of SRS WOW and TruSurround sound processing channel support. A dedicated S/PDIF jack and volume control as well as SRS buttons help. However, the capabilities of this machine are hampered by the lack of onboard multimedia playback buttons (except for volume control) and the option of a mini remote control.

On the software front, LG as a major system maker has included a whole slew of utilities and features to get the user going. Utilities such as the BatteryMiser and Bluetooth manager are excellent.

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