‘Super Ultrabooks’ – LG Z330 and Z430

CES 2012 has seen a few manufacturers entering sectors in which they previously were unknown. Fujitsu wowed with its underwater tablet, and Dell made a belated entrance to the ultrabook market with the Dell XPS 13. Now Korean giant LG has launched two ultrabooks at CES 2012. But this is no shrinking wallflower entry to the sector – the press release refers to them as Super Ultrabooks.

The two models are the LG Z330 and the LG Z430, and the pair are certainly amongst the slimmest and lightest ultrabooks on the market. They’re not bad-looking either. But for the ‘super’ designation to carry any weight, the Z330 and Z430 need to pack some muscle in the spec department. First off, the display.

A few ultrabook manufacturers have bragged about levering 14-inch displays into 13-inch chasses, with reduced bezels or edge-to-edge displays helping out, but LG has gone one better by squeezing a 13-inch screen into a tiny 12-inch shell. Where the majority of ultrabooks taper down from 17mm or 18mm to some freakishly wafer-like edge at the front, the Z330 has settled for a slimmer overall look, measuring 14.7mm all the way from front to back. And at 1.2kg it’s one of the lightest in category. That extra thickness has been put to good use by LG, so that the Z330 features a full HDMI socket and three rather than the customary two USB ports. And of course there’s plenty of space for an Ethernet jack, which is lacking on the Acer Aspire S3
or on Asus Zenbook UX-21.

The ‘Super’ prefix is appropriate thanks to the speed and power of the Z330 – it’s top-tier Intel i7 CPU and state-of-the-art SATA3 SSD combine to deliver a complete boot cycle in – wait for it – under 10 seconds. The 14-inch Z430, which is a good bit heavier at 1.5kg, offers a hybrid solution, with a 500GB hard drive and smaller SSD for the OS and essential software. We’re not sure whether the Z430 will be offered in pure-SSD form.

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Posted in: laptop, LG, Ultrabooks