HP Mini 1000, two weeks in

I’ve been using the HP Mini for a couple weeks now. I have to say it’s a nice little machine. Tiny, light, and very portable. It’ll certainly be my travel laptop of choice. The keyboard is just large enough I can type on it just happily. It’s a fantastic netbook.

There are some downsides.

My main concern is battery life.

The underpowered 3 cell battery gets two and a half to two and three quarters of an hour out of a session. That’s uninspiring. Add to that the fact that HP’s 6 cell battery that promises 7 hours looks like a snail’s foot sticking out of the bottom of the Mini, and you have my classic frustration with using things developed by engineers.

They came so close to a great machine, and then the upgrade battery looks like this:

That’s painfully ugly. It takes all the svelte qualities of the HP mini and wipes them out in a single bound.

Maybe some enterprising individual will develop a proper 4 cell battery for the HP mini in the same size as the existing battery that takes the Mini up to a more usable 3.5-4 hours and that would be perfect.

Basically, I want to unplug a laptop from my wall and take it with me for a half-day of work. Maybe it would be less of a concern if HP’s power adaptor weren’t the usual monstrous heavy brick that non-Apple designers seem to get a hard on for that comes with every damn non-Apple machine I’ve ever used.

Seriously, power bricks ain’t svelte, and you would have thought non-Apple manufacturers would be copying this small, but profoundly useful, improvement. Instead of thick, hard-to-wrap cords, and a power brick in the *middle* that separates the two cords but for no real function (like Mac’s ability to just plug the power brick directly into the wall) they could work on slimming these things down. I don’t want to load the power brick up with me to go to the damn coffee shop for an afternoon of writing. And with just over 2 hours of battery life, the netbook alone doesn’t cut it.

So for convenience, I still throw the MacBook into my backpack and go, because I know I can sit in the coffee shop for a whole afternoon without the device dying on me.

Josh at ImJosh (above link), is right. They should use the HP 2700 6 cell design, an ultra-flat battery that extends the length of the laptop’s bottom and thickens it, instead of making the poor HP Mini look like some form of shellfish with a muscular foot extended underneath.

Speaking of Josh, yesterday he hooked me up with a custom USB drive bootable version of the Windows 7 beta, and I signed up for one of Microsoft’s free license keys so I could take it for a whirl.

Installed on the netbook, Win7 is surprising solid, multitasking without any of the herky jerks I find on XP. It’s a tight install, without too much cruft, and the Aero affects are modern, and more importantly, useful from a UI sense. Hover the mouse over the taskbar, and open windows of that app appear in a thumbnail over the button. You can now visually, and easily, manage a large number of open apps in windows using this system. Consider me duly impressed. I still prefer expose, but within 15 minutes of using Win7, I found I was far more comfortable running more than 3 programs at the same time. Something the old taskbar was never able to allow me to do (for the first two weeks on the HP Mini I had Anthabounce software installed that mimicked OS-X Expose in order to make XP usable). I’d used XP for 2 weeks, and still had my usual list of ‘things I hate about XP’ going. Win7 seems far more usable. I think, just after two days of using it, I’d keep it installed, and won’t bother with Ubuntu, (which I preferred over XP), other than keeping a copy on a thumbdrive for fun and education.

I’d still prefer an Apple MacBook Air, mind you, but I don’t have the budget right now, nor will for a long while. Back when Apple was making 12 inch iBooks and Powerbooks, I’d been hopeful they’d continue making tiny and svelte with solid battery life (I still think the 12 inch powerbook is just the bomb). Hopefully the popularity of netbooks will prompt an Apple response, or they’ll offer a 12 inch MacBook Air around the next time I have the money for a new Apple laptop in a year or two!

Until then, I’m still happy with the core HP Mini design (6 cell and power adaptor notwithstanding), and use it a lot around the house and plan to travel with it.

But for working around town, the MacBook will still reign supreme, I wouldn’t be able to use the Mini for all my laptop needs just yet.

Filed under the topic Tech: Computers on January 14th 2009 at 11:45 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.