Prime Notebook Computer Review

If you asked us in the past if we like HP’s netbooks, we’d tell you, “It depends.” We love the business-focused Mini 5102, for example, because of its great keyboard, sturdy design, and over 10 hours of endurance with its 6-cell battery. But the company’s consumer 10-inch netbooks haven’t measured up to the competition from ASUS, Acer, and Toshiba. HP has put its best foot forward with the Mini 210 ($384 as configured), which takes Intel’s Atom N450 processor and wraps it in a sleek new design with an improved keyboard. This configuration also pairs a high-def screen with Broadcom’s Crystal HD Enhanced Media Accelerator for HD playback. However, this netbook doesn’t last as long on a charge as other Pine Trail netbooks. The bottom also runs warm, and its touchpad requires a bit of a learning curve. Should you make this Mini yours?

Design
The HP Mini 210 is a netbook with better than usual styling and design. It feels almost futuristic with its textured lid and base, edge-to-edge glossy screen and concealed touchpad buttons. Furthermore it has no annoyingly visible and extremly bright status lights – it’s almost stealth-like in this regard. The power, hard drive and battery indicator lights can be found on the sides. The Wi-Fi, caps lock, mute and ‘touchpad disabled’ lights are visible on the top of the system, but only when these features are enabled. Even the panel on the base of the HP Mini 210 netbook seems futuristic: you don’t have to use any tools to remove it in order to get to the single memory slot and 2.5in hard drive bay. Simply remove the battery, press the release buttons and pop off the cover with your fingernails. Admittedly it can be a little difficult to remove and at times it feels like the plastic clips that hold the panel in place might snap, but if you’re slow and careful they won’t. The bottom panel of the HP Mini 210 doesn’t have any vents and it is one single piece of plastic. To keep cool, the internal components rely on an air intake vent on the right side and an exhaust vent on the left through which the small system fan pushes out the accumulated warm air. When you use it on your lap – even after a short amount of time – the vents can get blocked and it gets noticeably warm around the hard drive and CPU areas. This becomes uncomfortable after a short while and it’s not a good thing for a notebook that’s designed to be highly mobile and used on a lap.

Features
The exterior of the Mini 210 is so nice that it’s rather disappointing to discover that underneath the exterior lies a rather plain netbook recipe. Windows 7 Starter edition sits on top of an Intel Atom N450 1.66GHz, 1GB of RAM and an Intel GMA 3150 graphics solution. The display screen is a 10.1-inch 1024×600 LCD panel, same as pretty much every other vendor. Wireless is supported, but it’s only 802.11b/g. Officially HP sells five variants on the Mini 210. There’s the entry-level AU$449 1015TU model, and then five models at an AU$599 price point; the 1016TU, 1017TU, 1018TU and 1020TU. The difference between the top tier models is only in the colour of the lid (Black, White, Red and Blue respectively), but the difference between the sole AU$449 model and the AU$599 models lies in storage, power and integrated Bluetooth. The AU$449 model comes with a 160GB hard drive, no Bluetooth and a three-cell battery. The AU$599 models bump that up to a 250GB hard drive, integrated Bluetooth and a six-cell battery. We tested with the 1020TU, which is the model with the blue casing. Aside from Windows 7 Starter, HP also offers up a quick launch operating system based on Splashtop Linux OS. Being HP, it’s subtly re-branded as “HP QuickWeb” and offers a near instantaneous boot for simple web browsing, music playback, photo browsing, Skype and chat applications. If you don’t like Splashtop it’s easily disabled from within either QuickWeb or Windows 7.

Keyboard and Touchpad
Here’s an instance where we’re glad a notebook maker borrowed design elements from the business side of the house. Like the Mini 5102, the island-style keys of the Mini 210 have a rubber-like matte coating that offered a pleasant tactile feel. Due to its nearly edge-to-edge footprint, the keyboard felt nice and roomy, and we were able to reach our normal typing speed and error rate right away. We appreciated the snappy return, proper placement, and sizing of the keys, even along the edges. As with other HP systems, the Function keys along the top row are reversed so that users have one-touch access to multimedia controls, volume, brightness, the wireless toggle, and more. Generally speaking, we’re not fans of touchpads with integrated touch buttons, but the Mini 210 is one of the better implementations we’ve used on a netbook. The 3.1 x 1.8-inch clickpad fills up as much vertical space as possible, jutting right up against the keyboard above it. We encountered a little more resistance than we’d like when navigating the desktop, but the integrated buttons worked well, offering solid feedback. Nevertheless, we continue to prefer the discrete touchpad and buttons on the Toshiba mini NB305. Multitouch gestures were smooth, though there aren’t many beyond two-finger scroll and pinch-to-zoom. When typing, we didn’t find ourselves accidentally brushing the touchpad (even though it’s so close to the keys), but users prone to this issue can adjust the sensitivity in the mouse properties or double tap the dot on the upper left corner to disable the touchpad altogether.

Display
The screen has a native resolution of 1024×600 and it’s bright enough to use outdoors and indoors with the lights on. It has a glossy plastic pane that extends from edge to edge. This will reflect light, which will possibly infuriate you while you try to view photos and videos. It has a webcam at the top as well as a microphone and two concealed Wi-Fi antennea. The netbook’s lid is strong and the hinges hold it perfectly in place.

Ports & Webcam
The Mini 210 has a typical spread of ports for a netbook: VGA, USB and headphone/mic combo ports on the left; Ethernet, 5-in-1 memory card reader, Kensington lock slot, and the remaining two USB ports on the right. We like that the right USB ports sit closer to the back of the system, keeping connected devices out of our way. HP bundled the Mini 210 with ArcSoft’s WebCam Companion 3, which not only allows users to record video and take pictures, but also to edit and upload them to YouTube or Snapfish directly from the program. The webcam delivered acceptable image quality when chatting over Skype, though the output was somewhat grainy. A quick adjustment of the hue setting resulted in truer colors, and upping the contrast produced richer images. Unfortunately, each time we moved our Skype companion we noticed blur, regardless of how fast or slow we were. It wasn’t distracting, but it was

Performance
The Mini 210′s physical build ensures a pleasant computing experience for the most part. Like most thinner netbooks, heat build-up can be an issue. Likewise, in common with other six-cell models, the bulky battery juts out of the back at an angle that can be a little uncomfortable on the lap, but these are minor quibbles. The keyboard response is excellent with well spaced keys and a responsive clickable touch-pad. Atom processors and PCMark05 haven’t always behaved well together in previous tests, and this was exactly the case with the Mini 210 which crashed the test suite repeatedly. Based on simple application testing and the fact that the Mini 210′s innards are quite standard, you can expect a slow performance out of the 210. 3DMark06 did complete, but its score of 155 puts it solidly in the Solitaire-only camp. We ran the Mini 210 through our standard battery testing regime. This involves switching screen brightness to maximum, disabling all power-saving features entirely and setting a looping XviD file to run to the point of battery exhaustion. It’s a test that’s designed to be brutal and give a “worst-case” battery life scenario. In actual usage — especially with a dimmed screen, less intensive processing and judicious use of Wi-Fi only when needed — you can expect a lot more than we get with this test, which only gives us a base line. The Mini 210′s base line was highly impressive, however, lasting four hours and 45 minutes before conking out. HP has historically placed something of a premium on its netbook designs, so the fact that the RRP of the Mini 210 is in line with the current netbook norm is highly pleasing. Combine that with a great keyboard, instant-on Linux capability and very good battery life and you’ve got an excellent netbook.