HP Mini 1000: A Winner
Ever since HP’s first laptop (The HP 110–sure wish I had held on to mine!), I’ve been a huge fan of HP portable computing. Not since the Omnibook 300 (and it’s later and amazing color sibling, the Omnibook 800, pictured), though, has HP captured my passionate support in the way the new HP Mini 1000 does. I’m not along. Netbooks are all the rage this year and the Mini 1000 consistently appears at the top of critical reviews. It’s high design and superb usability have even won over at least one hard core Apple fanboy.
I ordered the totally solid state version of the Mini which is a bit more expensive and less capacious with the advantage of lightness and ultra-durability. Combined with HP’s new wireless portable laser mouse, this new machine feels much like an Omnibook on steroids.
It will take time to determine exactly where this little beauty fits in to my daily repertoire, but it’s sub-laptop features and performance seems to fit well with the digression back into the world of Windows XP. Early rumors of Windows 7 running on SDD netbooks has me excited about January’s promised public beta. I will likely back up machine and dive in. I may not wait. The PDC beta of Windows 7 has been very stable and feature complete in my testing.
The slightly-smaller-than-standard keyboard slowed my typing for the first 30 minutes or so. HP’s superior netbook keyboard has been winning the hearts of many technical pundits. It’s easy to see why with use.
Here you see my “Xena” sitting atop my equally-new Dell Latitude E6500, which incidentally may be the first Dell I actually become fond of. Curiously, these two machines define the size extemes of all portables I’ve used from day 1.