So, lo and behold, what do I happen to find but Laptop Magazine's review of the new HP Mini 1000. My, that was unexpected now, wasn't it...
Anyhow, the full specs:
- 10.2" LED backlit WSVGA (yes, thats right, 1024x600 resolution) screen
- 1.6GHz Intel Atom (like everyone else)
- 1GB RAM limit on XP, 2GB RAM limit on MIE/Ubuntu (more on MIE in a bit, but standard fare here)
- 60GB 4200RPM 1.8" hard drive or 8/16GB of flash - now this is interesting. 1.8" drives are horribly slow, and don't have much storage capacity, but they needed it to be thin and cheap. But so, soooo slow, as if netbooks didn't have enough performance issues to begin with. At this point, I'd be leaning towards the 16GB SSD and an 8GB SD card...
- Black plastic casing, with a patterned back, and apparently the best netbook keyboard ever. Is HP's MiniNote line the ThinkPad of netbooks? Its increasingly looking so, as far as quality and keyboards go.
- Led up to this with the previous point - excellent build quality, even with the plastic casing.
- 3 cell battery at the start, not until January will there be a 6 cell battery. Expect 3 hours of life on the 3 cell, and correspondingly, 6 hours on the 6 cell. Disappointing on the wait time...
- As far as ports go, HP has taken the Apple route and cut things. Theres only two USB ports on here, and VGA out requires an adapter.
- Also - a note on styling. This thing looks FANTASTIC, and is extremely compact dimensionally, especially when compared to the rather chunky EEE 1000H. However, it can't touch the much more expensive <s>Mini MacBook Air</s> EEE S101.
- Starting price is $399, or $379 with MIE, and the Vivenne Tam edition will come in mid December for $699. I'd suggest picking up the aforementioned EEE S101 if you have the insane urge to drop $700 on a netbook. Or a lightly used Sony TX series, really.
MIE - its a proprietary build on top of an Ubuntu codebase. It has some of the features of the Instant On operating systems (like, uhh...instant on?) for quick booting, and runs a GUI similar to that of the TouchSmart OS used in their TouchSmart touchscreen PC. Oh, and unlike the Instant On OS's that many systems now have, MIE is actually a full OS, based on Ubuntu. Sadly, its proprietary, and not open source. Losers.
Now, the real potential dealbreaker here for me, at least, is the 1.8" hard drive (don't they have 5400RPM 1.8" drives already?) and the low amount of flash available (for example, the EEEs have 40GB SSDs as options...), and to an extent, the unavailability of a 6 cell battery for the time being. However, with that said, the styling, build quality, and keyboard are major pluses in favor of the HP. It'll be interesting to see whether HP's gambles work in the marketplace.
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