HP Mini 210 (Vivienne Tam Edition)

Ultraportable notebook

By Jeska Innes / Tuesday, July 27 2010

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Beauty and fashion aside, how does this glamour puss stack up on the hardware front? A lot of netbooks on the market, especially cheapies, come with 1GB of ram and small hard drives, which limits their usefulness. With a generous 2GB of RAM onboard and a pretty decent hard drive (options up to 320GB), the HP Mini has enough capacity to store videos, images and the like without having to drag around a secondary drive, and really that’s the whole point of an ultraportable device like this. That little bit of extra RAM makes it a bit quicker to use, but of course with an Atom Processor it’s never going to be a speed freak. Still, given its purpose as a highly portable communication and entertainment tool the HP Mini is more than adequate.

Like most notebooks of its kind, battery life is exceptional (up to 5.5 hours). I literally watched five episodes of Breaking Bad back to back without a charger, which made me pretty happy. The speakers are quite tinny, so you’re better off plugging in earphones to watch videos. On the plus side, there are three USB ports onboard, which is really handy.

A small gripe is the awkwardness when opening (or should I say ‘prying open’ the HP Mini), it actually needs a recess or ridge of some kind to give fingers some purchase. Still, the extra effort is worthwhile because once the lid is lifted this gorgeous notebook performs well.

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