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- Dare me to spin it?

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- Whoa. - [Jono] Whoa. - I do love me some LGs and today I've got three of them,

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a 14, a 16, and a 17-inch version

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of the LG Gram 2021 laptop.

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Now, which one do you guys want me to start with? The little one or the not-so-little one?

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- [Jono] The chungus. - The chungus?

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That's fine. That's fine, just fine. We're going full chungus here.

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So, the Gram 17 is not as light

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as the Gram 14, which is just one kilogram. This puppy is 1.35 kilos.

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But it does come with some key benefits

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including an 80-watt-hour battery instead of a 72-watt-hour battery,

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and a 2560 by 1600 screen

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instead of a 1920 by 1200 screen.

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And I got to say, the first thing that stands out to me about this

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has got to be the finish. LG has glowed up the Gram, like,

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big-time here.

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Whoo. Now, I know this is just a black laptop,

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which isn't exactly an innovation, but the finish on it is really sleek.

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Let's just see if they've managed to make it not, you know, totally flexible,

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(laptop creaking) Hm, keeps improving.

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You know, it's always going to be a lightness first, ruggedness second kind of device,

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but that's actually not too shabby.

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Included in the box is a nice, compact power brick, I actually really like the rounded edges on it,

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makes it a little easier to slip in and out of your bag. And then over on the side here, there we go,

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we've got HDMI-to-USB Type-C ports,

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those are those Thunderbolt 4 as well as an audio jack.

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I'm just going to power it on real quick here, show off the dual USB Type-As as well

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as a Kensington lock and Micro SD. And now let's talk about that power button for a second,

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that is not your ordinary button, we've seen this feature before, notably from ASUS.

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But it's a fingerprint sensing power button that does more than just detect your finger print

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when you get to the login screen and let you login. It actually caches your fingerprint ahead of time.

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So you power up the machine, it goes, "Oh that fingerprint,

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okay, I'ma hold on to this for a second." And then when you get to the Windows login in screen...

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(snapping) It will log you right in. Assuming of course that you have...

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- Welcome, I'm Cortana. - Pre-configured the thing.

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(laughing) Cortana, shut up, we don't care.

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- For all you plan to do. - Which is fine because the 2021 Grams also includes support

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for A-L-E-X-A if you're into that sort of thing, because Amazon doesn't have enough of your data yet.

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Let's go ahead and blow through the setup wizard and we'll talk about some of the other cool stuff.

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Boy that is a big screen.

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The touch pad is another big improvement

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over the last generation. This is actually, oh, look at that. (laughing)

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Jono happens to have a 2020 Gram,

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so you can see not only is it much larger on the 2021,

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I actually really prefer the more sharp corners compared

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to the super rounded corners on the last one and this color scheme just looks next gen.

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See you later 2020 gram. Almost there.

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Hey, there we go. Do I have an option to not get started?

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(chuckling) Nope. That's this, you can adjust the color temperature of the display.

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That's another key benefit LG is touting for the 2021 series Grams,

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it is 99% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space.

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Pretty darn impressive. Now, what I want to know is,

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this looks like a 60 hertz display, but could that be perhaps turned up

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or are we just going to have to settle for color accurate?

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I do wish everything had high refresh rate. Nope, okay, that's fine.

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It's standard dynamic range and only 60 hertz refresh rate.

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One of the other key improvements, pun intended, is to the keyboard.

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So they've added another 0.1 millimeters of key travel

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as well as flattened out the tops of the key caps

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instead of making them concave. I'm not a huge fan of concave key caps on a laptop

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so I personally consider this to be a good move. As for the layout, It is a touch cramped

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because LG has opted to include a number pad on the 17-inch model.

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But as we have a look at the smaller ones, you're going to see that that's not necessarily present.

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When I say cramped, by the way, to be fair, I don't mean, you know, it doesn't have the right number of keys

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or anything like that I just find a couple of them like the enter and the backspace are a little bit easier

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to overshoot and accidentally go off the rails here.

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It's the kind of thing that if you were actual owner of this device, you would get used to.

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Uh-oh, you see this? A McAfee pop-up.

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Andy, there's McAfee on my machine.

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Oh yeah, there was also a DTS X Ultra icon here.

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So supposedly the two watt speakers in here

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are like DTS X surround or something.

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So why don't we go ahead and see how they sounded at least,

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even if we're not testing the DTS capabilities

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- NVIDIA's long awaited premium, mid range

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and pure architecture GPU, this-- - Yeah, it sounds super hollow, doesn't it?

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- [Woman on laptop] XT provides high performing teams of developers to-- - I'm talking like, you know what I mean?

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Yeah. Wow, I can really feel the position

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of the speakers on this device. Normally you wanted to kind of sound to the user,

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like the person they're actually watching is speaking and the sound's coming out of the screen,

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but we do not get that effect at all

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with the downward firing speakers here. They sound like okay,

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but especially in a world where Apple's MacBooks exist

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and actually Dell's XPS lineup for that matter. It's a little bit tough to have speakers

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that are this far behind. Depending on which version of mobile mark you look at

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LG rates this puppy for anywhere from 15 to 19 and a half hours of battery life.

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And the last thing I want to check before we check out the 16-inch is,

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here we go, ready?

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Not bad. Does it do it when it's fully turned off?

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I would like to know.

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Did it do it? It did do it.

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So one disadvantage to fingerprint compared to a facial sensor is that it does mean

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that you can't just like open up your laptop and have it come to life,

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but it's pretty okay. Today's ShortCircuit is brought to you by BLUblox.

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Now let's shift our attention to the 16-inch.

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This is a more conventional Gram kind of finish,

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but you know what? It's a little bit kind of a cooler color

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than I'm accustomed to seeing. This looks really sharp as well.

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So you see how much room there is for air flow back there?

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Kind of crazy. Just like the 14 and 17, the grand 16-inch is equipped

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with an 11th Gen Intel processor. And if you've got a core i5 or a core i7,

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that means it comes with Xe graphics. Now, one thing I was a little disappointed to see,

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where did my fix-it kit go? Is that it appears that though they got a speed boost

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going to LPDDR4X memory at 40 to 66 megahertz,

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which is fantastic for performance,

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it appears as though the memory on these machines is not upgradable in any way.

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So let's go ahead and pop it open in order to verify.

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Oh wow. You can really see like how skinny

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the material it's made out of is. Like, it's kind of amazing by the time they assemble

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this whole thing that it's rigid at all, you know?

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- [Jono] That's a really attractive battery. - Yeah, I know, they really stepped up

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their battery packaging game. So that's the 80-watt-hour that's in the 16 and 17-inch.

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And... That's the soldered system memory.

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Ugh, that means that whether you go eight gigs or 16 gigs,

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you are stuck with it forever.

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I would like to see a 32 gig option in that case

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and what I'd really like to see, especially given that they have so much space in here

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is a SODIMM memory slot although admittedly,

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it would add extra weight. Simple single heat pipe cooler

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with the exhaust right back here. And this is nice though,

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at least they've got dual M.2 expansion slots. So both of these are NBME capable

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and this one's actually SATA capable as well. It's always so crazy to me the lengths

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that LG will go in these grants to save some weight, like look at this, having the motherboard,

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look at this, look at the size of this motherboard, that's it, right? So there's your CPU, memory, storage,

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It's basically all there. And then they go all the way over here with the little skinny ribbon.

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Okay, so there's your daughterboard to handle your USB.

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Wireless is over here as well. And then you've got these gaps, see this?

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You've actually got gaps in the PCB again, probably to save weight.

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It could also be cooling related since it's right next to the M.2s.

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And then Thunderbolt is handled over here along with HDMI.

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Oh. Probably should have powered that off

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before I opened it. - [Jono] Oh my God, it's on?

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(laughing) - Now it's time to check out the 14-inch.

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Okay, only 72 watt hour battery and yet

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somehow it ends up with very similar rated battery life

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to the other two and a big part of that is because it does have a smaller, lower resolution display.

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Of course, when you step down to a 14-inch device,

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you don't need as much resolution because the pixel density

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is still going to be quite solid. On the subject of solid,

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given that this is the only still sub kilogram LG Gram,

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that is actually not too shabby at all. Like I'm putting...

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You can see I'm putting a lot of force on this thing here. How's the screen?

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Especially now that we've seen the individual layers and the material and like how flimsy they are

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it's kind of amazing that it's as solid as it is.

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In terms of IO, it's identical to the others, so Thunderbolt 4 is still included,

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full-Sized HDMI, full-size USB and of course it's crazy, crazy light.

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The touch pad is not as large as the other two, but for a 14-inch notebook,

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I would say that this is a very generous sized touch pad.

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And as for the keyboard, I'm actually expecting to prefer this one,

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because one of the things that bothers me about larger laptops with a number pad off to the side

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is that it kind of makes it so that centered in front of the device,

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you know, where the touch pad is right in front of you, you have to go over here in order to type,

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and I find it a little uncomfortable, so let's see.

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That feels, that feels pretty darn good.

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Wait a second, what is lock button? Oh, okay, turns the webcam and mic off.

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Okay, they've comes so far since the original Gram where they couldn't even manage to put a backlight

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in the keyboard and keep it under the weight limit. Nowadays, I mean, it's got all the creature comforts.

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It's got Thunderbolt, it's got a high-speed processor,

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it's got adequate cooling, great battery life. I mean, there's a reason that these LG Grams

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never last long on the inventory shelf, people always snatch them up for internal use

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just because it's just kind of what you need

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and nothing else. And I really love the new finishes for this year.

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So that's it, that's our first look at the LG Gram 2021 lineup.

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The one thing we don't is a refresh of the two in one,

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which was actually my favorite from last time around. So that was the foldy touchscreen one, but who knows?

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Maybe LG will send over one of those when they are good and ready.

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And when you're good and ready, make sure you subscribe to ShortCircuit so you don't miss more videos just like this one.