1. Notebook Made In Korea: LG LW60

By now, nearly everybody knows that Korean electronics giant LG Electronics - offers a broad range of consumer goods. These include washing machines, air conditioners, LCD monitors, optical drives, mobile phones, digital video recorders, and TVs of all types. But only insiders likely know that for years, LG Electronics has been building many of the business and consumer notebook PCs sold by companies like HP and IBM. Now LG is marketing its own complete notebook lineup, which has been available for the last six months or so in parts of Europe and North America.

Our choice for this review was the LG LW60 Express, a Centrino notebook with a 15.4" WXGA Fine Bright LCD. It features a Super-Multi Dual Layer DVD burner, an instant-on DVD/Audio player with infrared (IR) remote control, ExpressCard/54 and PCMCIA Card Type II PC Card slots, and a full-sized 99-key keyboard with separate numeric keypad. The vendor describes this device as "an incredible unit with a perfect blend of multimedia and performance." In the following pages, we'll explore how well the unit lives up to this promise.

Note: Notebook PCs appear on LG's Canadian Web site, but not on its US site. To the best of our knowledge, the LG LW60 Express is only available in the US from Canadian vendor NCIX.com. The price as of this writing is close to $1,700.