Performance
The Mini-Note's performance abilities can be summed up in one word: 'lame'. But that's to be expected, really -- it use the slowest CPU we've encountered in recent times, plus the most bloated operating system on the market. It's no wonder it takes the machine about a minute and a half to boot up, and even less of a surprise that it scored only 538 in PCMark 2005 -- the lowest we've ever seen. Ever. The Asus Eee PC 900 Win managed 1,133 -- more than twice as much.
Battery life wasn't particularly impressive either. Using the standard 3-cell battery, the 2133 lasted 1 hour 33 minutes in our DivX movie playback test. We expect this will last an extra 15-20 minutes if you're willing to reduce the screen brightness and deactivate the wireless adaptor. In our BatteryEater test, it lasted 1 hour 52 minutes, although that was with the LCD brightness set at about 50 per cent.
Conclusion
There are plenty of reasons to love the HP 2133. It's affordable, it's impossibly attractive and it's more comfortable to use than any of its immediate competitors. Its performance is disappointing, however, and we don't like the fact it doesn't include a built-in 3G datacard. We'd recommend it to people who aren't concerned about the performance issue, but for the rest of us, the Eee PC is the mini-laptop machine of choice.
Edited by Shannon Doubleday
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