HP 2133 Mini Note struts its stuff
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 15th 2008 | Discuss
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HP’s Mini Note 2133
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
We first saw a Mini Note in early 2007 when our friends from VIA came to visit and brought some demos with them. It was an interesting device and, as usual, VIA was way ahead of the pack. In fact, VIA has almost always been ahead of the pack but they fail to win the prize when the pack catches up with them. This time it’s different and the Mini Note from HP is a design win triumph for VIA and a product win for HP.
Intel has been late to the game, as they have been to many games, and so they missed the boat on OLPC, then joined, and then quit; the reasons have been discussed in previous issues of Tech Watch and I don’t need to go into them here.
Intel did succeed in getting AMD knocked out of Asus’ Eee mini notebook. That too was a potentially early win for VIA, but Asus couldn’t resist Intel’s charms it seems.
However, HP, of late, has been marching to the beat of different drummer. Possibly spurred on, or encouraged by, Apple’s boldness and the cachet of their brand, HP has re-positioned the company from a system integrator of component suppliers into a blazingly attractive and strong brand, comparable to Apple, Sony, or Samsung.
The 2133 Mini Note is in keeping with the new HP. It’s bold, slick, and distinctive. The unit can be purchased with Windows Vista Business 32, Windows Vista Home Basic 32, Windows Vista Business with downgrade to Windows XP Professional custom installed, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, and FreeDOS. The unit I got arrived, thankfully, with XP Pro. I haven’t played with a Mini Note with Vista on it but I don’t think it would be too great an experience. Linux and FreeDOS are offered to get the price down.
The unit has a bright, shiny 8.9-inch wide screen, driven by a VIA IGP with Chrome 9 GPU in it and can display either 1024 x 768 (with no square pixels) or 1024 x 600 if you want square pixels. It has built-in Bluetooth, a VGA camera, a pretty nice sound system with speakers on each side of the display and a tiny hole to the left of the camera for the mic. But make no mistake, this little wonder is a real multimedia machine and can play videos and even some games.
About those videos. There is no optical drive option for the machine other than an external USB device—not that such things are expensive these days. HP offers an external DVD drive for $129 dollars, but you can beat that at BestBuy.
One of the main selling points of this little wonder is its full-sized keyboard. There’s a nice touchpad at the front and the comfort, as expressed by all our testers, was from good to great.
There’s a USB connector on either side of the unit, plus a VGA connector, a mic and headset connector and a RJ45, plus an SD slot and an ExpressPort socket—a lotta stuff crammed into this useful little box and it is little. It measures just 10.04 x 6.5 x 1.05 in (255 x 165 x 27 mm) and weighs only 2.63 lb (1.19 kg.)
The basic machine with XP Pro, a VIA C7 1.6 GHz processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and 120 GB5400 RPM HDD costs $729, whereas a unit with Linux, a 1.0 GHz CPU, 512 RAM, and no HDD but 4GB of flash can be had for $499.
I downloaded Open Office on the machine (and if you do that too, please make a donation, we need these folks).
I keep a copy of all my JPR files on an 80 GB HP Pocket Media Drive as a backup for my main machine (an HP Pavillon dv9700). The 9700 is big 17-inch display beast, which satisfies most of my needs but is in severe conflict with seats in the last class section of the airplane. So, if I don’t get upgraded, I don’t work on a flight anymore. (You’ve seen me, and others like me with the keyboard on our chest and the display open to just 30-degrees trying to work on a plane—it’s no fun and not much gets done other than amusing your fellow passengers with your stupidity.) Well, the Mini Note is so light and small I can take both with me when I know I’m not getting upgraded. I can then use the Mini Note with my backup drive and life is good.
What do we think?
We like it. It’s a powerful machine with good ergonomics, good price, light weight, and not lacking any features. I’m not going to play Crysis on it, but I am going to get a hellofa lot of work done.
It would make a great back-to-school laptop for any kid from 9 to 19. It’s got the HP brand behind it, and it can be configured with a variety of OSs to suit the user’s preference or OS religion.
This will fit in a purse, backpack, or briefcase. You can take it anywhere. It gets great battery life, the screen is big and the keyboard is excellent.—JP
Epilog
Dell is entering this segment too and will come out with an almost identical unit using an Atom CPU.
