LG Gram 14 2 in 1 (2021) Review: Still Awesome & Affordable

The last time I personally took a look at a Gram was quite a while back. It was a 17-inch light behemoth and that was pretty interesting. But I daresay most people who’re looking at getting a Gram, would be looking at either the 14–inch or the 16-inch.

Those two sizes are much more portable and practical for day to day use, especially if you travel around quite a bit. So here’s the 14-inch 2-in-1 and I will straight up say that I do quite like it. But of course, it’s not perfect and I’ll talk about those as well.

Firstly, the design. The one thing I do notice is the quality of the chassis. Compared to previous Grams which used a fair bit more plastic, this is almost entirely made out of Magnesium Alloy which does make it feel way more premium.

It looks good and feels good. It does really give that professional vibe and you wouldn’t look out of place anywhere. You’ll also be able to easily carry it around, for it weighs 1.25 kilograms or roughly 2.76 lbs.

Now it’s a 2-in-1, as mentioned, so you can flip the display all the way around, a full 360 and use it as a tablet. Or you can kind of flip it open three-quarters of the way and prop it up like so. In fact, if you watch content this way, it makes the down-firing 2-watt speakers face you instead, and it does sound a little better. And yes it’s a touchscreen display with Corning Gorilla Glass 6, so you needn’t worry about that.

Or you can use the LG Stylus Pen that comes with the laptop. It’s fully equipped with Wacom AES 2.0 and features 4,096 levels of pen pressure. It feels great and smooth be it for taking notes, drawing or even just browsing.

My only gripe about it is that it can’t charge via USB-C. Instead, it uses a quad A battery. LG states up to 18-month battery life, but we’ll see about that.

Now let’s talk about that display itself, 14-inches, IPS, 1920 x 1200 at 60Hz, 99% DCI-P3, 300 nits max brightness, and of course, touch-capable.

By all means, I would say it’s a gorgeous display with vibrant and accurate colours and a good resolution for a 14-inch display. Browsing the web, content creation and even gaming. It all looks great.

As for the webcam, it’s just like most other laptops out there. It’s 720p and it’s definitely nothing amazing, but it’ll get the job done.

But moving down to the keyboard and trackpad, I was definitely pleasantly surprised. The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s quite a bit of key travel. It’s quite weird because I didn’t expect that from a relatively thin laptop. And secondly, the keys bounce back with a pop like a tactile mechanical switch. It’s certainly interesting and it took a while to get used to it.

But overall, it’s a great keyboard and you’ll also appreciate the recessed power button that also acts as a fingerprint reader.

As for the trackpad, no qualms about it at all. It’s of a good enough size and I was comfortable using the laptop as it is without any accessories throughout the day with no issues at all. Which, speaking of, the laptop will also last you a day on the go, easily. With that 72 watt-hour battery, I easily managed over 9 hours of casual use for quite a number of times.

For ports, you get a simple but good few. Your trusty headphone/mic combo jack, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a standard USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A with a trapdoor level mechanism, a sleep/wake button and a microSD card reader.

We then come to the performance and depending on where you are, there might be different SKUs available. But in general, there should be two main options. An Intel Core i5, or a Core i7.

For our model, we have the Core i5. So, a Core i5-1135G7. 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM, 512GB of NVMe SSD storage.

Honestly, it’s plenty capable and to be expected from such a configuration. It’ll also be able to handle simple creative work like photo editing or video editing, though we would suggest sticking to 1080p edits for the latter.

And even with just the integrated Iris Xe graphics, you can still relatively enjoy some casual and less demanding games like CS:GO and Genshin. Though you will want to drop the quality settings or even the resolution to get a smoother gameplay experience.

Overall, the LG Gram 14 2-in-1 is simply a great laptop that looks great, performs well enough and can be versatile depending on how you use it. But like I said, it’s not perfect.

My main gripe is the fact that you can’t really open up the laptop unless you pry away the plastic nubs and tear away the rubber feet. Definitely not a good thing.

One other thing I would want to mention is less of a complaint and more of a suggestion, is to have a Windows Hello compatible webcam. There is a fingerprint reader, right on the power button itself and that’s great. But if the laptop is in tablet or tent mode, you can’t really access it. Having a Windows Hello compatible camera would make much more sense.

But apart from that, that’s about it. It’s still a great laptop overall, and at a decent price as well. For the Core i5 model that we have here, it’ll go for US$1,249 or S$2,299.

It’s still a little bit of cash, that’s for sure. But if you’re looking for a good everyday laptop that can power all your daily tasks and even some creative work at that. Not to mention, you can use it like a tablet and you also get the option to use the stylus.

It’s a solid package.