LG P430 and P530 Blade Announced: LG Slims Down
by Jason Inofuentes on May 6, 2011 12:17 AM ESTAnnounced today, LG joins in the race for thin with its latest P series notebooks, now dubbed the Blade series. Available in late May across Europe, South America, Asia and the Middle East (no North American release was mentioned), the new line features 14" and 15.6" laptops each sporting Sandy Bridge i7's in their slender profiles. Sporting an aluminum case, chiclet keyboard and quad-core-only line-up, there's little room to speculate from whence LG drew its inspiration. A few factors separate these new thin notebooks from the rest, however.
LG's display division has developed an ultra-thin LED display that sports a bezel about 40% smaller than is found around your typical display. The innovation allows its 14" class device to fit in the footprint of a 13.3" notebook; and while those two classes have seemed awfully close all along, this will surely blur the line even further. Being able to squeeze the display into a smaller footprint makes the device generally more compact, which means less materials used, which means a lighter weight. Indeed, at a listed 1.94 kg, the 14" P430 is certainly one of the lightest quad-core laptops announced so far. Its 15.6" sibling, the P530, weighs in at a spry 2.2 kg, besting the 15" Macbook Pro by almost a third of a kilogram.
Don't expect to be tearing through Crysis 2 on the (lightweight) go with these slim quads, though. Packing the lowly NVIDIA GT 520M, gaming is clearly not a priority amongst the designers at LG. Packing half as many shader cores (48) as the GT 420 M (96) it ostensibly replaces, the GT 520M's strongest competition comes from the Intel HD 3000 graphics. Yep, the one it's being packaged with. Obviously, buyers would still get to benefit from NVIDIA's PureVideo and CUDA technology, but this is exactly what Intel's latest integrated graphcis were designed to do, obviate the need for low end discrete graphics.
Even non-gamers might not be wowed by the visuals, however, as both the 14" and 15.6" displays are limited to 1366x768 as their only resolution option. Early reports indicate that the added cost of these small bezel displays will place a price premium on system costs, a disappointing thing to consider for a device whose compromises seem unrelated to its benefits. North American release has not been announced, so we can only hope that when these slender beauties do make it to these shores they bring a few choice upgrades with them. Full specifications below.
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von Krupp - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link
1366x768? They could not even throw the consumer a bone with a 1600x900 option? Sorry, but 768p is absolutely out of the question for anything larger than a 12" display.To top it off, we lose battery life on a redundant GPU. It's not even for the sake of the 3D gimmick fad.
Aesthetically attractive. Functionally unattractive.
jack_kelly - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link
I couldn't agree more. >= 1600x900 is an absolute must on a 14" screen.marc1000 - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
Actually I used to think like you, but the lack of options made me buy a 1366x768 laptop. Exactly the P430.And the resolution of the display is not a bummer like it sounds. I'm used to a 22" 1650x1080 display, and it has a big pixel pitch. I was worried that text would be too small on a 14" display, but with this "low resolution" it is actually readable.
bigger numbers are sexy, but the general world population is getting old and a lot of people wont have perfect eyesight forever.
high ppi makes text harder to read, and scaling does not work perfectly across the board (i need VMs and they dont scale with windows DPI). for this sole reason i changed my mind and now I think 1366x768 are perfectly fine for 13/14 inches.
beginner99 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link
... they sure won't get my money with a 1366x768 display.Put in a 1600x900 (better even 1680x1050), ship it with external dvd and forget about the nvida card which is barely better than hd graphics. Fill the space with bigger battery.
Done. And it would be sold like crazy,
sheltem - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link
Seriously. Imagine if they ditched the DVD drive and were able to cram the Macbook's Radeon 6750 in there with graphics switching. And throw in the new Synaptics clickpad that allegedly isn't derp derp with multi finger gestures.ppeterka - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link
You spoke from my heart! Are you reading my thoughts or what?But seriously, this 768px vertical resolution is unacceptable by any means for anything else than watxhing video. Do people buy SB Quad Cores to watch How I met Your Mother in HD???? NO!
Wake up Neo! (Umm, this is for the notebook companies!) For anything over 12", and not in the ultracrappybudget category (for now, anything that costs $500+), this is not worth the crap the crap would crap, if it could eat and then crap it out! Working with it is nearly impossible, but highly like gripping one well-grown cactus in both hands while trying to seem happily smiling!
And optical drives are for what? Haven't used a disc in a more than a year by now (and I live in the ever-so-technically-behindered Hungary), and the last one was Fallout3, because that bitch won't run without the original disc... I won't want to lug around unuseful crap. A 6750M has a lot more uses. An even slimmer design is a lot more useful. More cooling has a lot more uses. More battery has a lot more uses. There are so many choices there are to make useful notebooks, and this one fails at an awesome number of them!
I don't blame the guys (and gals maybe) who designed it, but those who ordered that this should be designed, and even more those, who approved the design...
policeman0077 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link
totally agree with your point. and i think the extinctive 16:10 or 4:3 screens work fine for mevon Krupp - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link
Oh 16:10, how I miss thee...Actually, I'm still using a 5:4 1280x1024 monitor on my desktop. Am I dated yet?
ppeterka - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
To top you: I use two of them 8 hours a day! Perfectly fine Eizo L557 displays, and I'm perfectly happy with them... If I'd feel the urge to get more pixels, I would probably convince our system admin guy to get two 1600x1200 displays for me. Though that's either a tough or an expensive task nowadays... I'd even go the pre-owned way...And yes, we might be dated. At least I'm for sure... Been sitting in front of the (various kinds of) displays since 23 years - yep, that's an awful amount of time...
16:10 is also way better than 16:9, though I like having two displays, that eases the work a lot, and I don't really like the idea of working on two wide-screens - that's just too much :)
But I could even be happy with any kinds of weirdo aspect ratios, as long as I get my daily fix of vertical pixels. Maybe we should create a petition of some kind, maybe supporting our cause with weird made up facts like manufacturing and operating 768p displays at >12" sizes kills 38,6% more baby seals than doing the same with higher resolutions...
ppeterka - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
(Attention, webtrolls! Please be as kind as to cite only the last half of the last sentence, but at the most places you can. Be of some use at last!):D