HP Mini 1035NR Netbook Laptop PC

The Bottom Line

12/2/08 - HP's sophmore entry in the netbook category brings some exciting features into a more consumer oriented model but drops too many features unique to the older 2133 Mini-Note. The best feature of the HP Mini 1035NR has to be its spacious and well laid out keyboard. The larger 10.2-inch display is also one of the brightest on the market. They also made a great decision to include Bluetooth for wireless peripherals. It is too bad then that they made some big mistakes by dropping the number of peripheral ports, using a smaller and slower hard drive than their competitors and leaving the difficult to use trackpad.

Pros

• Strong Wireless with Bluetooth
• Roomy Keyboard For a Netbook
• Bright Display

Cons

• Limited Expansion Ports
• Smaller and Slower Hard Drive
• Short Touchpad With Poor Button Placement

Description

• Intel Atom N270 Mobile Processor
• 1GB PC2-5300 DDR2 Memory
• 60GB 4200rpm SATA Hard Drive
• 10.2" WSVGA (1024x600) LCD Display
• Intel GMA 950 Integrated Graphics
• Fast Ethernet, 802.11b/g Wireless, Bluetooth v2.1
• Two USB 2.0, 2-in-1 Card Reader
• 10.3" x 6.6" x 1" @ 2.4 lbs.
• Windows XP Home

Guide Review - HP Mini 1035NR Netbook Laptop PC

12/2/08 - The HP Mini 1000 is their second netbook to hit the market and is very heavily based upon the previous 2133 Mini-Note. It has a very different look because of the use of black plastic shell compared to the metal one but this alone decreased the overall weight of the unit. Thankfully HP kept the keyboard design for the Mini 1000 giving it one of the best overall thanks to both its size and layout.
One of the biggest changes in the Mini 1035NR is the use of the ubiquitous Intel Atom N270 processor compared to the slower VIA C7-M. This gives it a significant boost of performance over the older 2133 Mini-Note and is more on par with similar 10-inch netbook offerings. It uses a single gigabyte of PC2-5300 DDR2 memory per the licensing restrictions of the Windows XP Home operating system.
Storage for the HP Mini 1035NR relies on a hard drive rather than flash memory. The 60GB drive is smaller than what many other hard drive based netbooks are offering. More disturbing is the slower 4200rpm spin rate of the drive compared to the 5400rpm rates of traditional laptops. This gives the HP Mini a major disadvantage for simple drive tasks such as booting up the operating system. HP really needs to consider upgrading this drive.
The display on the HP Mini 1035NR uses a 10.2-inch panel with a 1024x600 resolution. This is a bigger screen than the older 2133 Mini-Note but with a lower resolution. Thankfully, the screen is one of the brightest on the market making it very easy to use even with the glossy coating that can cause excessive reflections.
The biggest problem with the HP Mini 1000 netbooks though is the ports. It is limited to just two USB ports and an SD slot. This puts it well behind offerings from other companies. Even the VGA port requires an adapter to use.