LG Gram 17 Review: Lightest Laptop With Some Battery Goals

17-inch laptops have evolved rarity apart from games. Our laptops want to be elegant and compact, and the bulk of 17 inchers can be quickly removed. However, LG Gram 17 is not the size of most laptops. Quick, sleek and delicate. It’s shocking. A quad-core, 16 GB RAM, and a 17 inch 2.560 x 1,600 pixel screen came to us as our $1,700 review unit.

Flexibility & Weight

The LG Gram 17 is incredibly bright as the name of the laptop and the branding display on its dark silver board. Starting at 2.95 pounds, the Dell XPS 15 which is 4.2 Pound and MacBook Pro which is 4 Pounds are some of the most common 15″ Notebooks. It’s almost feather thin in contrast with 17-inch HP notebooks, which weigh in at 5.4 pounds.

All this is due to a design of metal alloys, a mix of Nano carbon and magnesium. It is necessary since Gram 17 gives the metal look and feel, but the plastic portability. The Gram 17 is literally so small that we were able to throw this aside and fly without having a heavy weight on our back. Go ahead and try using a traditional 17” machine.

Sadly, there are some shortcomings in the development material. While LG says its LG Gram 17 has been tested to meet the military standards MIL-STD-810 g to ensure maximized durability, when we pressed the function keys above the keyboard, we felt some flex in its chassis. This also moves to the display lid which, as tension is put, bends left and right.

LG Gram 17’s other areas are strong. A huge 17-inch display with a minimum of wobbling between motions and lids open with only one side, can comfortably be held by the handle. LG can even reduce the laptop’s total size by slimming the bezels of the side and wrapping in a 15-inch body.

With other large screen 17-inch Windows devices, this is something you cannot easily find. It is easy to bring and use Gram 17 when you are out and about and it does not require too much room in your lap to think about it. If you are a New Yorker, this means that the huge screen doesn’t hit the next person on the train.

Yet LG did not have to give up on ports all this lightness. Gram 17 is a balanced set of classical and modern communication. On the left side, USB A, HDMI and 3 USB-C ports are included. On the right, it is a slot for the micro SD card and 2 USB-A ports. 802.11 A / C (2X2) Wi-Fi is supported, Bluetooth 5 is supported, too.

You should all use this and bid farewell to the dongles. Thunderbolt 3 is also a benefit because of the absence of LG Gram 15 and LG Gram 142-in-1 versions last year. You now can plug in an external GPU to play and power up to two external displays.

Keyboard

Laptops such as the XPS 15 or HP Envy 17 have broad keyboards, though, the LG Gram 17 has some difficulty. LG chooses a strange design choice, but not a little bit off to the left, as most laptops with number pads, to keep the touchpad smack in the center of the frame. This indicates that the G and H keys of the touchpad are slightly off balance.

When we were typing, we had to push our hands away from the touchpad in order not to drag the cursor with one arm. The keycaps still feel a bit thin and shallow for our hands, still give us a good click input. Key travel were graded to 1.2 mm and we have not had any issues when it came to writing posts in WordPress due to our regular typing trials. We have 70 words per minute without breaking a sweat in a typing test software.

The black Gram 17 appears like a MacBook keyboard in black & silver. The job is done in the night with two stages of backlighting. We did not notice any light flickering, but LG would have applied one additional level of illumination for better convenience.

Display

At a resolution of 2,560x 1,600, LG’s Gram 17 offers a 17-inch pixel-box screen. It may not be as bright like the 4K screen on the XPS 15 table, but still vivid, clear and a range of colors.

Gram 17 is 70% of the Adobe RGB range with an overall contrast of 930. The consistency of the color is also impressive, scored 1.81, and 395 nits are fantastic. The lower is higher, which implies the average color error of the Dell XPS 15 is 3.32. This is still below the excellent 0.61 color deviation of the MacBook Pro 15.

The 17-inch screen is an excellent option for creating content and efficiency if these figures were put in the real world. It is not only large enough to open several windows side-by-side but also sharp images and text on web pages. It’s because of its bright finish, which is luminous but also reflective.

Two speakers on the undersides of LG Gram 17 provide Audio with the DTS Headphone. It has 11.1 audio streams, and the rhythms are particularly thrilling once you heard “Camila’s Living Proof”. No reductions in bass or muffled sounds are reported.

Battery

You can use the battery on a standard laptop for either 9 or 10 hours on the Internet, but not the LG Gram 17. The four cell 4 lithium-ion battery lasts longer than other 15-inch laptops we reviewed with a powerful punch.

LG states that the battery life of Gram 17 is up to 19.5 hours. It worked 15 and a half hours until we quit as we lopped a 1080p video. It’s a little away from LG’s comment, but it’s still amazing, indeed. This is less rigorous than our most in-depth, 5-hour Basemark tests. Eventually, the gram 17 always lasts about 12 hours to complete our iMacro analysis.

We praised Dell XPS 15 for its battery life, all day, and for ten hours; but that streak is broken by Gram 17. The battery on board will be kept for 15 hours during our least challenging trials, while its younger siblings, Gram 142-in-1, and Gram 15, are still in use. The Asus ZenBook 15 still battery life is very easy to overcome. Nothing can top Microsoft Surface Book 2, a 15-hour record, but it’s getting close. LG knows clearly how to pack lots of juice in its computers, and we hope others can follow.

Final Words

The LG Gram 17, which is a great achievement, is the lightest 17-inch laptop we have ever seen. It is a perfect laptop for the business traveler or somebody who does not always have access to an additional multi-tasking screen, together with long battery life. Nonetheless, the lightweight board, lack of a dedicated GPU and sluggish SATA SSD are heart breakers for $1,700.