Since its release at the tail end of 2007, Asus’ little Eee has won plenty of admirers. Tiny, light and inexpensive, it’s all the laptop many people need. And, despite several manufacturers making half-hearted attempts to recreate its success by rebadging VIA’s NanoBook design, the Eee has retained a firm grip on the sub-notebook market. Until now.

HP has finally unveiled its take on the genre: the long-awaited 2133 Mini-Note. And it makes the Eee look and feel positively cheap in comparison. We gave the 2133 to a couple of our colleagues and let them use it for a while. Then we told them how little it cost. Cue looks of complete and utter disbelief.

It is a beautiful laptop. Pluck the 2133 from its dumpy brown cardboard box and the magnesium alloy chassis immediately feels classy and expensive. Considering its petite 265 x 165 x 33mm dimensions, it doesn’t feel quite as light you might expect.

Tipping the scales at 1.27kg, the Mini-Note weighs almost as much as some fully fledged ultraportables, such as NEC’s Versa S9100 and Lenovo’s X300. But 1.27kg is still far from overweight, and it makes the 2133 feel impressively sturdy. Compared to the plasticky frame of the Asus Eee, it’s in a different league entirely. There’s a little flex in the base if you really tug at it, but the display is incredibly rigid and offers the 8.9in panel good protection.

If there’s anything to moan about, it’s that the bulletproof frame isn’t matched by the slight wobble in the chrome-effect hinges, but this is no deal-breaker.

The diminutive HP continues to impress in other key areas. We’ve moaned time and again about the Eee’s tiny keyboard, and it seems someone at HP has been listening. The 2133’s silvery keys stretch right to the edges of its chassis, and apart from the shrunken Function keys and the small cursor cluster, all
the alphanumerical keys are full size. There’s not quite the depth of travel you’d find on larger laptops, but in a laptop this size the positive feel and comfortable layout is by far the best we’ve encountered.

That keyboard comes at a cost, though. With only a thin strip of chassis left fallow below it, the mouse buttons are forced either side of the trackpad. It’s a change born of necessity, but it takes a little getting used to.

The trackpad may be a little disappointing, but the Mini-Note’s display goes some way towards making amends. It shares the same 8.9in diagonal of the Asus Eee PC 900 but where even Asus’ premium Eee has to make do with a 1024 x 600 screen resolution, the HP sports a glossy 1280 x 768. There’s no hint of the slightly grainy quality of Asus’ panel either; instead, the 2133 provides a bright, crisply defined image.

In Australia, the only operating system available on the 2133 Mini-Note is Windows Vista Business. Elsewhere it’s possible to get the Mini-Note with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.1. Our test unit came with Linux pre-installed, but unlike Asus, HP has made zero attempt to customise the
installation to make it more accessible. If you’ve never used Linux before, that may make for a daunting first few hours with the 2133.

The 2133’s principal weakness is not its software, however, but its limited processing power. A low-voltage 1.2GHz VIA C7-M processor, a gigabyte of memory and a 120GB hard disk are impressive on paper. But in use it’s sluggish. The Eee 900’s 900MHz Intel Celeron processor, partnered with the snappy solid-state disk, made for a system that was much more responsive.

The 2133’s battery life hammers a final nail into the HP Mini-Note’s magnesium alloy coffin. Sitting idle, with wireless off and the screen set to medium brightness, the three-cell battery died one minute shy of the two-hour mark. Turn wireless on and try using the HP, however, and you can expect that to
drop to little over an hour. Opt for the six-cell battery and stamina will increase, but so will the weight. It’s also fair to expect battery life to dip a little with systems with Windows, thanks to the increased performance demands of the full-fledged desktop operating system.



Overall, the HP’s 2133 Mini-Note is a flawed gem. In many regards, it’s superb. It looks and feels vastly more expensive than it is and is outstandingly usable for such a tiny laptop. But, while the chassis is excellent, we can’t help feeling that HP has wholly missed the mark with both its software and hardware.

One of the main attractions of the Eee PC is its user-friendliness, a trait sorely lacking here. Replace the VIA processor with one of Intel’s forthcoming Atom chips or, dare we say it, add a Windows XP version and the 2133 would have little trouble in deposing the Eee from its pearly white throne.

But until the HP can boast battery life and performance to match its finely honed figure, Asus’ Eee will remain our budget laptop of choice.