Imagine yourself sauntering at a coffee shop and arrayed before a number of sitting netizens smattering with their very own MacBook Pro and Vaio lappies. Yours is of an unknown brand of laptop whose design craftsmanship obviously paled in comparison to their glossy and splendid exteriors. And you became what is called as a fashion victim of technophile.
Yes, even electronic gadgets is following a redound of fashion and just like any goods, it is pulsed by price. Tides of technologies, wave of breakthroughs, different names, different frills but all boils down to a trend of digital style.
Cry yourself a river no more.
HP just unveiled a product so light and compact and will surely save you from the disgrace of indignity. Presenting HP Mini Note 2133.
Amidst a flurry of small and seemingly underpowered netbooks, HP has taken a slightly different tact in their release of the surprisingly capable HP Mini-Note device. While its subPhp30K price tag places it in a significantly different category than the Asus, MSI, Astone, and Redfox , it easily makes up for this price difference with functionality and power approaching that of its larger siblings: full sized laptops.
Indeed, small, light and affordable is the name of the game in the flourishing market for mini laptops right now.
But when HP, one of the world’s biggest computer makers, entered the fray this year it made its own original statement for the midget laptop - the HP Mini-Note 2133, slightly steeper priced, it is touted as the “rich man’s Eee-pc.
Unfortunately, while the HP Mini-Note 2133 is one of the finest of the breed in certain areas, it really misses the mark in others.
Quite unusually HP opted for a VIA processor rather than the usual Intel or AMD offering, in the HP Mini-Note 2133’s case a VIA C-7M CPU designed for low-power use rather like the Intel Atom.
This single-core unit, clocked at 1.2GHz, must take most of the blame for the HP Mini-Note 2133’s biggest weakness: speed. Not everyone needs a racehorse as a runaround, but the fact is that the Mini-Note is dreadfully underpowered – never more so than if you follow HP’s recommendation to use Vista.
Our Vista-burdened HP Mini-Note 2133 came from Research Machines, who also kindly provided the necessary discs to ‘upgrade’ to Windows XP; or alternatively there’s a version with Red Hat Linux preinstalled.
We used the HP Mini-Note 2133 initially with Vista, but soon grew impatient with the time it took to get simple tasks done, or even to open and view Windows’ Control Panels.
Our real-world benchmark test also bore out the subjective experience. Scoring just 21 points, we subsequently wiped the disk and installed Windows XP Pro. Now with slightly less bloat and DRM to slow the machine down, the HP Mini-Note 2133 earned a WorldBench 6 score of 25, still pitiful even by the standards of other mini laptops.
Not bad at all. Obviously, this laptop isn’t meant for high-end computing applications like gaming or video-editing, but it’s the perfect for those who need to surf the web and do a little work, especially since the HP 2133 is smaller than a large hardcover book. We also didn’t find any built-in CD or DVD drive, but the availability of external drives addresses this problem somewhat.
HP has just put its fairly large boot smack into the middle of Asus’ territory. Will it be able to steal the Eee PC’s thunder? It has a good chance. Though it’s slightly bigger than the Eee PC, the Mini-Note also has big brand-name backing, and slightly more flair for design than the Eee.
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