HP 2133 Mini-Note

Full specifications | 1 Comment

The problem is that HP has tried to compensate for the limited height by increasing the touchpad's width, but this just makes matters much worse. With so little vertical space and so much horizontal, it’s impossible to strike a usable balance in the touchpad’s sensitivity settings, since what works for one direction renders the other unusable.

Of course it would help if the Linux driver supplied for the Synaptics pad offered more than just a basic sensitivity slider, but HP really would have been better off fitting a Thinkpad-style mini-joystick in the keyboard and dropping the touchpad altogether.

Unlike other reviewers, we were less bothered by the novel arrangement of the mouse buttons – one at each side of the touchpad. The real problem is that they have to be pressed so far to click that they feel like they’re activating a lever from a manual typewriter rather than a microswitch. Not good.

HP will be versions of the 2133 Mini-Note in the UK – the KX872AA and KX867AA. Both use the same VIA C7-M ULV 1.2GHz processor and have 1Gb of DDR2 RAM and a 120Gb hard drive, but the former comes with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, the latter with Windows Vista Business (and a £50 price premium).

The VIA C7-M ULV chip has cropped up in a few ultra-portables to date (most recently the OQO model e2), but we’ve yet to see it deployed to great effect. Power consumption may be more important than raw power for a device like the 2133 Mini-Note, but it’s important to strike a balance between the two – and that’s not the case here.

The C7-M ULV draws just 5W when working flat out, but in the 2133 Mini-Note, it feels decidedly sluggish. And this, remember is with lean, mean Linux – Windows Vista won’t be anywhere near as nippy. In practical terms, it takes around 90 seconds to cold boot the 2133 Mini-Note and around 25 seconds to shut it down.

Hibernation takes 39 seconds and returning from this state 75 seconds. Given that the 2133 Mini-Note has a spinning disk rather than solid-state drive, it isn’t a laptop that you can sling in a bag as soon as you’ve closed the lid, though the hard drive does have a shock sensor that parks the read/write heads to prevent impact damage to the spinning platters.

Perhaps the best sign of the processor’s lack of oomph is with YouTube, where videos slow to a few-frames-per-second crawl when played full-screen. This may not be a deal-breaker for anyone interested in more serious tasks, but it makes the 2133 Mini-Note much less versatile than other low-cost ultra-portables.

Unfortunately, despite its below-par performance, the frugal VIA C7-M ULV processor doesn’t do much for battery life, either. The 2133 Mini-Note lasted for just under two hours when sat doing nothing with Wi-Fi enabled and the screen at half-brightness. The lighter, faster Eee PC 900 lasted for almost three and a half hours under the same conditions. And the 2133 Mini-Note gets pretty warm even when it’s doing nothing. It’s not enough to make it uncomfortable on your lap, but then it won’t be there in the first place since the cooling vents on the base need to be kept clear.

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