HP 2133 Mini-Note

If anyone had asked us to name a laptop manufacturer capable of producing a credible alternative to the Eee PC, the letters “HP” wouldn’t have been the first to trip from our lips. And yet here it is with the 2133 Mini-Note – the first low-cost ultraportable we’ve seen that to look more like a serious business tool rather than a novelty learning aid.

And there’s no ignoring the 2133 Mini-Note’s looks – it is absolutely gorgeous. Asus and Packard Bell may prefer cheap-looking plastic for their low-cost laptops, but not HP. The 2133 Mini-Note is clad in a sleek brushed aluminium case that looks and feels like a million dollars.

HP has clearly drawn inspiration from its equally stunning 2710p Tablet PC for the 2133 Mini-Note and further design cues are apparent when you lift the lid. The screen is covered by a single sheet of plastic that extends across the whole lid interior and although the actual display is framed with a good inch of plastic at either side, the effect is far more aesthetically pleasing than on the Eee PC 701's screen.

The lid feels reassuringly rigid too, and is mounted on a pair of stiff, sturdy hinges. There’s no lid catch, but the risk of damage from objects working their way inside the case with the lid closed is mitigated by the screen’s scratch resistant coating.

At 265mm, the 2133 Mini-Note is quite a bit wider than the Eee PC 900 (225mm), but it’s a shade smaller in the other two dimensions. It’s just as easy to carry in a bag or big pocket, though its extra 200g or so may make you a little more aware of its presence.

Despite measuring having the same 8.9in diagonal as the Eee PC 900’s screen, HP has plumped for a 1280 x 768 panel for the 2133 Mini-Note (the Eee PC 900 makes do with 1024 x 600). The glossy finish won’t appeal to everyone, but it is wonderfully crisp and clear and while the high resolution and means that some website text can be a little hard to read, this is easily remedied by tweaking the appropriate settings in Firefox.

Impressive, yes, but the screen’s brilliance is almost eclipsed by the 2133 Mini-Note’s keyboard. That extra-wide case means there’s room for good-size keys and the keyboard is a mere 8% smaller than full-size, with a completely standard layout. The wide, flat keytops are comfortable to use and while even an 8% size reduction takes a little getting used to, the keyboard is among the best we've seen on any ultra-portable.

If only HP had as much attention to the touchpad. With only 42mm of wrist-rest to work with, no touchpad is going to be perfect, but the one on the 2133 Mini-Note is truly appalling.

The problem is that HP has tried to compensate for the limited height by increasing the touchpad's width, but this just makes matters much worse. With so little vertical space and so much horizontal, it’s impossible to strike a usable balance in the touchpad’s sensitivity settings, since what works for one direction renders the other unusable.

Of course it would help if the Linux driver supplied for the Synaptics pad offered more than just a basic sensitivity slider, but HP really would have been better off fitting a Thinkpad-style mini-joystick in the keyboard and dropping the touchpad altogether.

Unlike other reviewers, we were less bothered by the novel arrangement of the mouse buttons – one at each side of the touchpad. The real problem is that they have to be pressed so far to click that they feel like they’re activating a lever from a manual typewriter rather than a microswitch. Not good.

HP will be versions of the 2133 Mini-Note in the UK – the KX872AA and KX867AA. Both use the same VIA C7-M ULV 1.2GHz processor and have 1Gb of DDR2 RAM and a 120Gb hard drive, but the former comes with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, the latter with Windows Vista Business (and a £50 price premium).

The VIA C7-M ULV chip has cropped up in a few ultra-portables to date (most recently the OQO model e2), but we’ve yet to see it deployed to great effect. Power consumption may be more important than raw power for a device like the 2133 Mini-Note, but it’s important to strike a balance between the two – and that’s not the case here.

The C7-M ULV draws just 5W when working flat out, but in the 2133 Mini-Note, it feels decidedly sluggish. And this, remember is with lean, mean Linux – Windows Vista won’t be anywhere near as nippy. In practical terms, it takes around 90 seconds to cold boot the 2133 Mini-Note and around 25 seconds to shut it down.

Hibernation takes 39 seconds and returning from this state 75 seconds. Given that the 2133 Mini-Note has a spinning disk rather than solid-state drive, it isn’t a laptop that you can sling in a bag as soon as you’ve closed the lid, though the hard drive does have a shock sensor that parks the read/write heads to prevent impact damage to the spinning platters.

Perhaps the best sign of the processor’s lack of oomph is with YouTube, where videos slow to a few-frames-per-second crawl when played full-screen. This may not be a deal-breaker for anyone interested in more serious tasks, but it makes the 2133 Mini-Note much less versatile than other low-cost ultra-portables.

Unfortunately, despite its below-par performance, the frugal VIA C7-M ULV processor doesn’t do much for battery life, either. The 2133 Mini-Note lasted for just under two hours when sat doing nothing with Wi-Fi enabled and the screen at half-brightness. The lighter, faster Eee PC 900 lasted for almost three and a half hours under the same conditions. And the 2133 Mini-Note gets pretty warm even when it’s doing nothing. It’s not enough to make it uncomfortable on your lap, but then it won’t be there in the first place since the cooling vents on the base need to be kept clear.

SUSE Enterprise Linux 10.1 (SP1, on our review unit) looks and feels like Windows XP – so much so, in fact, that you might wonder why Novell hasn’t been sued. But be warned – unlike the user-friendly Xandros distro of the Eee PC, this is the real thing and while seasoned Linux users may feel a frisson of delight at having to first find, then figure out how to add a distro-compatible online repository just to resolve the dependency errors that inevitably arise when installing program, we do not.

Unfortunately, HP hasn’t seen fit to supply Windows XP drivers with the 2133 Mini-Note, so losing Linux won’t be as straightforward as you might expect. There are almost certainly compatible Windows drivers available, so here’s hoping that some kindly user tracks all them down and shares their location.

We really, really wanted to love the HP 2133 Mini-Note and we’re tempted to claim that its superlative build quality, stunning screen, excellent keyboard and capacious storage more than outweigh the problems caused by the puny processor and terrible touchpad.

Alas, they do not and the overriding impression of the 2133 Mini-Note is that HP expended so much effort on the looks (and boy, did it succeed) that out of ideas when it came to the nitty gritty of its operation. A more powerful processor (even one from VIA) would probably do the trick but otherwise, the 2133 Mini-Note is nothing more than a good first effort from HP – Asus has nothing to worry about.

[Related: See all Mobile Computer netbook reviews to date]