The Bearable Lightness of HP's 2133 Mini-Note PC

HP announced a $499 laptop today targeted at the education market. The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC seems remarkably underfeatured to me for the price: it has no DVD or even CD drive; no hard drive (a 4 GB flash module is included); an 8.9-inch display; just 512 MB of RAM, and the Linux operating system (SuSE Enterprise Desktop 10). What gives?

It's all about the weight, durability, and market segment. I could go and buy a Dell Inspiron 1525 for $499 and get Windows Vista Home Basic, a CD burner/DVD writer, 2 GB RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and 15.4-inch screen, among other features.

When I drill into the details, too, I find a lot about the HP model that's particular to this market as well. It's got a sudden-motion sensor for drive safety built into the models with hard drives that start at $549; Dell offers that only as a $150 capacity/feature upgrade on the 1525. The small screen is WXGA--least 1,280 by 768 pixels, which means images and video should be crisp, not blocky. A built-in VGA camera on the HP 2133 costs $25 more to add to the Dell unit.

But the biggest tradeoff is weight and size: the Dell starts at 5.9 lbs (2.7 kg); the Mini-Note PC, just 2.8 lbs (1.3 kg). For students and staff alike, that's a lot less to carry, and may be a big part of its appeal, just like Apple's somewhat less-than-fully-equipped MacBook Air that sheds 2 to 3 pounds off similar devices from Apple and other makers.

The Mini-Note PC is quite small, too, measuring 10 by 6.5 by 1 inches (25.5 by 16.5 by 2.7 cm) to the Dell Inspiron 1525's wedge of 14 by 10 inches (36 by 26 cm), with depth tapering from 1.5 to 1 inches (3.7 cm to 2.5 cm).

For a little more, you can get something like a "regular" laptop: $599 gets you Windows Vista Home Basic, 1 GB of RAM, and a 120 GB hard drive, as well as 802.11a/g networking instead of the plain 802.11g found in both the Dell and Mini-Note.

It seems that for an increasing number of users, less may be much more.

PC World Senior Writer Darren Gladstone runs the HP through its paces in this video.