| HP dropped the new Mini 5101 Netbook today, and I have to say it looks like a winner. HP is kindof an odd duck in the Netbook world and they have had a somewhat incoherent product suite. Their first Netbook had the form factor and design right (sporting an Apple like aluminum case and awesome keyboard & display), but it was saddled with a high price, Windows Vista and the less than stellar Via processor (rather than the de-riguer Intel Atom). HP then followed that up with a me too Netbook that offered nothing to diferentiate itself from say, the Lenovo S10 I am writing this on. Add to that a "Mini" with a 12" screen and stir. The Mini 5101 looks like the inexplicably good looking child of awkward parents. More... It has a 10 inch LCD available in the standard 1024 x 600 resolution, or you can opt for the high end 1366 x 768 sortof HD. Like the first Mini it features exemplary construction with a brushed aluminum lid and magnesium chassis and 95% full sized Macbook like chicklet keyboard. The new HP Mini has an Intel Atom processor and a unique set of Hard Disk options. The standard drives are high performance 7,200 rpm spinning disks, but optional are the first (to my knowledge) high capacity SSD (solid state disks) offered in a Netbook @ 80 or 128 gb. I could not find specs on the SSD's however and they vary dramatically in performance, given the high price of decent SSD's (The OCZ SSD I mentioned in an earlier post - which will outperform a 7200rpm drive) I suspect they are the low end, but the pricing details will reveal that. You can get the Mini 5150 with XP, Vista or some McLinux and it starts @ $450. This is a pretty serious computer though, and like HP's other Netbooks and many German cars, the "as ordered" price will probably be at least 1/3 to 1/2 higher than the loss leader. |
I have one of these HP Mini 5101 Netbooks sitting in front of me right now. We are looking into deploying them to mobile workers. We will see if this is capable of meeting the business needs. One of the first things I noticed is there is no easy way to service hardware on this Netbook. It looks to me like if a keyboard is broken or a hard drive fails we will need to ship the whole machine out to get repaired which can take up to 1 week, as opposed to having the part sent to us which normally takes 1 to 2 days at most.
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