June 24, 2009

Since the netbook craze began, the ultra-portable PCs have been a hard sell to business customers. Hewlett-Packard's newly unveiled HP Mini 5101 is trying to buck that trend by delivering a full mobile computing solution in a small package.

Like many notebooks and netbooks these days, the HP Mini 5101 was built with an eye toward design, ensuring that it won't look out of place in a coffee house or on an airplane. But it also boasts durability with an anodized aluminum display enclosure with a black, brushed finish. The keyboard is 95 percent the size of a normal notebook, which in a 10.1-inch form factor netbook, is respectable.

While HP may want the Mini 5101 to be more than a secondary device, the internal specs continue to make it a hard sell. For starters, the 5101 is powered by the Intel Atom N280 processor and a Mobile Intel 945GSE Express chipset, which is standard for the netbook category, but somewhat underpowered compared to a full-sized notebook.

Storage on the netbook is abundant, with HDD options of 160 GB, 250 GB or 320 GB available; the Mini 5101 also supports an 80-GB solid state hard drive. The memory on the netbook is good, with up to 2 GB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM -- but memory is capped at 1 GB for customers who choose to install Windows XP Home Edition.

A six-cell removable battery configuration can provide up to about 8 hours of life, according to HP, but will add to the weight of the netbook. The starting weight of the HP Mini 5101 is about 1.63 pounds, but increases depending on individual configurations.