Portability wise, the Mini-Note still ousted most notebooks in our comparison ratio, and was almost comparable to the Apple Macbook Air. Despite what we mentioned that the HP Mini-Note is in a distinct class, we can't help noting that the Sony notebook was even better engineered for efficiency given that it used a faster all-Intel platform, had an optical disc drive which we used for our battery life tests and had a larger screen. Shown in the graph as a point of reference is the Sony VGN-TZ18GN ultra-portable 11-inch notebook, the last really slim and handy notebook we tested. However, note that this was achieved with the extended 6-cell battery that came with our review unit, so the 3-cell battery will not last quite as long. While we do not have a direct comparison to accurately comment against, the Mini-Note lasted for 153 minutes on our video looping test, which is pretty decent.
We also disabled features such as WiFi and Bluetooth and tweaked it such that the various power saving measures do not kick-in to hibernate the unit before it actually runs out of juice.
Without a DVD drive to loop a movie with for our standard tests, we resorted to grabbing a high-definition video and looping it continuously at our normal brightness and volume settings of 50%, similar to our test for the Macbook Air. Even if you take it apart, it's merely for serviceability as you can't change much besides upgrading the memory using the single SO-DIMM slot and perhaps a larger capacity hard drive. The good news is that it's not really hard to take the Mini-Note apart, but HP has obviously designed the Mini-Note to be as tamper-proof as possible, so there are no visible screws on its shell on first looks. So if you're a big fan of SSDs, you might want to hold off getting the Mini-Note for now (although the gains are usually not as much as the technology claims to be at the moment).īeing the curious bunch we are at HardwareZone, we gently took the Mini-Note apart to check out its innards, but we didn't get far as we didn't want to damage this gem.
Having a speedy 7200RPM 160GB HDD also helped somewhat, and HP has informed us that they will also be shipping solid-state drives (SSD) for the Mini-Note in the third quarter of this year. While its size may be small and its processor somewhat lacking, using the Mini-Note was still a smooth and pleasant experience, thanks in part to the 2GB of RAM that our review unit was shipped with. Small On the Insides Small On the Insides