LG’s answer for the discerning masses, the E 300 is a good looking notebook with a charcoal-grey finish. It’s solidly built, and the body and finish feels durable enough to last through a couple of years of abuse with relative ease. The keys are well laid out, beveled, and exude a nice, positive, firm feedback, which makes using this a pleasure. But it’s not as compact as other 13.3-inches notebooks in the market, which is why it isn’t doing a one-on-one with the XPS M1330 which features in our “portable” category.

 At 2.04 kg, it’s not the lightest of the 13.3-inches notebooks. On a different note, this notebook’s left palm rest gets quite hot, presumably, because of the fact that LG uses the body of their notebooks as heat sinks. Still, the heat dissipation should be restricted to the undercarriage of the notebook, and working on this for around an hour warmed up our palms quite a bit, which is good for winter, but isn’t appreciated in the month of May.

A decent configuration— T7300, 2.0 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, a Radeon Xpress 1250, and a screen size of 13.3 inches—mean the XNote is a good notebook for road warriors and desktop oriented users alike. Although the Radeon chipset won’t do gaming or even serious HD playback (at least not without the inevitable skip), the E300 features an HDMI out.

At Rs 52,000, the E 300 is an attractive looking solution that finds itself in the wrong category and at the wrong end of a performance war. In this category, the cheaper Dell XPS 1530 easily wins all accolades over this, while in the portable category the Dell XPS M1330 easily won. So it’s caught between a rock and a potentially hard place. That is why we aren’t recommending the E 300 to anyone.