The HP Mininote has faded into the background recently due to the hype over Acer, ASUS, MSI and Dell netbooks but remains a favourite in terms of design. A quick poll on the live session the other night revealed that the majority of chat room members think its the best looking of all the netbooks. I tend to agree. As a netbook, its very attractive. The original target market though was schools and that’s why it was built to spec, with its tough chassis and splashproof keyboard, rather than a price.
According to HP’s Jerry Chong, (commercial notebooks business development manager) HP will offer a cheaper version. There’s no word about the possible changes in it but what Yahoo are saying about removing the ruggedness, sounds about right. Maybe it will be a lot lighter too which will be a nice side-effect.
The question remains though about weather HP will re-visit the CPU. If Intel drops a near-ready Diamondville board on their doorstep at a good price and VIA aren’t ready with Nano, it would make sense to go with Atom. Why? Because reports are coming in from all over the place that Atom is doing a great job with Vista. I’m even experiencing it myself here with the M912X. More about that later though.
Coming up in the next 24-hours, Ben’s review of the HP Mininote. In the meantime, you can brush up on HP Mininote specs in the HP Mininote product page.
The problem is that the ruggedness of the laptop is what sets it apart from all the other netbooks (that and the keyboard and screen resolution).
I think it would be a bad idea for them to remove any features that sets their model apart, as there would be less and less reason to purchase thier model over the competition. They also need to keep the “ease of accessibility” for upgrades, the HP is probably the easy to access the memory and hard drive.
Alot of people are willing to pay a bit more for a higher quality product (I am one of them). They may be better off offering 2 models, one at an ultra low price point.
They definately have to drop the C7-M though, as I won’t buy one until it has an Atom or Nano processor, and I have money in hand waiting for them to change the CPU.
I have to say that, while I love the looks of the mini-note, and some of its features (not Vista as a choice, as opposed to XP, that was plain silly), I have had such a grotesquely abysmal experience with HP’s repair service (under warranty) that I would have to be utterly seduced by an individual device in order to ever contemplate buying their product again.
I see these cons as more serious than these pros:
http://tnkgrl.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/life-with-the-hp-mini-note/
HP needs to use their old 728 Jornada form factor and stuff full windows in that! That is what would sell a lot of units! Most business people do not need a super fast PC nor are graphic type users; thus most would just want a basic computer running full Windows that is narrow enough to carry in a jacket pocket yet has as large of a touch type keyboard so that the computer can be their only mobile computer.
Have just another question about M912 – does the screen driver support resolution 800×600? I require this for one fullscreen application, stretching is not a problem. Thanks.
Sorry, wrong place :(
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