HP Mini 5102

As the sequel to one of our favourite all-round netbooks, the HP Mini 5102 has some pretty big shoes to fill. It wasn't HP's choice in components that we liked about its business line 10-inch system — after all, most 2009 netbooks shared a very uniform set of parts — it was the overall design and build quality of the netbook we liked.

With a body made of aluminium and magnesium alloy, the 5101 felt significantly more rugged than many of the plastic netbooks it was competing with, and its excellent keyboard layout made typing a breeze. The new version, the 5102, offers only minor cosmetic tweaks, but also more configuration options, including a touchscreen.

There are six different SKUs available of the Mini 5102 in the Australian market, and anything above the baseline adds significant cost (up to AU$1199 if you opt for the 80GB SSD model). All Mini 5102s in Australia come with a 1366x768 native resolution, 10.1-inch screen; our AU$599 review unit in particular though (the WL606PA) came with a single-core Intel Atom N450 processor, Windows 7 Starter Edition and 1GB of RAM. HP also offers a touchscreen on two SKUs — the WP428PA and WP429PA — which sell for AU$849 and AU$999 respectively.

Looking very similar to last year's Mini 5101 model, the 5102 has a black brushed-metal lid and matte black keyboard and keyboard tray, offset by a glossy touch pad. The overall look of the netbook is definitely on the business side of the equation, but it's also sleek enough to hold its own at a hipster coffee shop. Though it's not the thinnest or lightest netbook ever, it feels solid and durable, without being a brick.

We were concerned when HP ditched its previous wide, flat keys for a redesigned pebble-style keyboard in the 5101. The 5102 keeps this new design, and time has shown it to be a good one (although we still have a soft spot for the older design). Important keys, like Shift, are nice and large, and the top row of function keys are reversed — which means the actually useful tasks of controlling volume and screen brightness, and so on, are the primary functions of those keys, while the somewhat more obscure F-key functions require you to hold down the Fn key. It's a swap we've seen on a few laptops recently, and seems like a generally good idea.

The Mini 5101's touch pad is a traditional type, with the mouse buttons located under it — rather than the side mouse buttons and elongated touch pad found on older HP netbooks. We prefer this style, but at the same time, the touch pad itself is small and its slick surface attracts fingerprints like literally nothing we've ever seen before — therefore it often looks dingy.

Our very base model configuration of the Mini 5102 included 802.11n, Bluetooth, gigabit Ethernet and three USB ports. A Gobi-based WWAN+GPS module makes an appearance in the more expensive models.

HP includes the Corel Home Office software instead of the usual Microsoft Office trial version, but we're not sure why it would be preferable to the free Open Office suite as a Microsoft Office alternative (the HP employees we asked didn't have any particularly compelling reasons to offer). HP also includes a fairly standard feature from full-size business laptops, a hard drive accelerometer called, in this case, HP 3D DriveGuard.

Intel's new single-core 1.66GHz Atom N450 CPU is the new standard for netbooks, and while it doesn't really offer any performance gain over the previous generation N270 and N280 Atom processors, it offers greater power efficiency. Our standard netbook admonitions apply — they're great, as long as one keeps expectations modest, and sticks mostly to web surfing, email and working on office documents.

The HP Mini 5101 ran for three hours and 19 minutes on our video playback battery drain test. That's not in the upper echelons of netbook battery scores, but certainly enough for most on-the-go tasks, especially as the system should last significantly longer under casual use.

Via CNET.com