Thread: HP Mini-note 2133 Laptop

The Eee PC has spawned a mass of copy-cats, but most of them have been pants - plastic and underpowered. The Vista-running Mini-note could be different. It comes dressed in a seductive aluminium shell with a near full-size keyboard. It's cheap-ish, but will it make you cheerful. With an 8.9in 1280x768 WXGA screen, the Mini-note is ready to go head-to-head with the similarly specced Eee PC 900. The screen is bright and evenly lit but the additional protective screen (added to stop school children from smudging it with jam-covered fingers) adds extra glare that could be irritating when you use it in bright environments.

This version has a 120GB HOD and 2GB of RAM. This might not be as resilient as the Eee PC's solid-state disk, but if you want to hoard loads of data, the space might be handy. Our US cousins can get XP and Linux versions and different sizes; we should get them once there's wider distribution.

Processor nerds are raving about Intel's Atom - a lower-power chip for mobile computers. Sadly, the Mini-note is still rocking a Via C7 processor. It'll run XP and handle day-to-day tasks, but could struggle with demanding apps. Rumour has it an Atom version is in the works.



Watching manufacturers squeeze features into tiny computers can be pretty uncomfortable, like observing a chubby Goth fruitlessly trying to squeeze into leather trousers. But it looks like the Mini-note might have done it. Instead of opting for the kind of cramped keyboard that'll give you RSI in nanoseconds, HP has managed to keep it at 92 percent of full size.

While most subnotebooks go out dressed in plastic, the Mini-note has a taste for finer things, opting for Apple-style aluminium. It makes it seem much classier, and could give it a fighting chance of staying in one piece when it ends up slung in your bag with your keys.