When netbooks first appeared they were initially looked down upon by the business community as being no more than toys. [IMG 79150/] Surely, a real business executive would have a ‘proper’ ultra-portable computer, most likely made by Sony or Apple and probably costing an outlandishly large sum.

Soon though, the huge success of those early netbooks, timing conveniently with the onset of the recession, saw the world and his dog jump on the bandwagon and now everyone, bar the technologically snobby Apple, has one on their roster.

However, though the netbook was feisty and youthful it was far from the Peter Pan of computers, for it most certainly wanted to grow up – and in the guise of the HP Mini 5101, grow up it has.

There’s no sign of the cheap look plastics, slightly dodgy keyboards, and blurry screens of its cheaper brethren – the Mini 5101 has a fully executive look and feel. Of course, HP has done this before, with last years Mini 2133, but this year’s effort is better, and not just because of its smart piano black and matt finish that the whole machine is encased in.

Let’s start with it closed. The brushed aluminium effect and silver HP logo combination on the lid offset by the smooth black strip running across the top, is pure class. Open it up and the glassy black bezel also looks the part. Beneath the screen though it’s the keys that draw the eye, being raised squares that look like they’ve been hewn. It brings to mind a black Macbook, which isn’t a bad visual reference. Bang in the middle above this is a neat round silver power switch, while to the left are two small shortcut keys that launch the default browser and your mail client.

But it’s not just the way the Mini 5101 looks, it’s also the way it’s built. There’s no creaking plastics here – it feels plenty sturdy with solid rubber feet on the base.

Typing, one of the bug bears or so many netbooks, benefits from the spaced apart position of the keys, though there’s no getting away from the fact that the small size of the machine makes things slightly cramped, but that’s something you’ll get used to.

Wonderfully, HP has included a plentifully wide shift key on the right, as well as generous proportions for the Enter and Backspace keys. Inevitably, there’s some compromise, with the F-keys on the top row available just from the Function shift, but that’s a sensible choice with the shrunk down keys defaulting to brightness and volume controls.

There is some very slight rattle as you type, and the as the keys are raised you can actually see the innards of the machine, which might unnerve some, but it’s still first rate for a netbook keyboard.

The display too is a cut above. It’s just right for a netbook at 10.1in and the bright, sharp, clear display that wouldn’t look out of place on any laptop. The use of LED backlighting plays a part with this. There’s still some contrast shift as you move to the sides or peer down on the display, but viewed straight on, as most of the time you will be, this is as good as it gets for netbooks. A webcam sits in the display above the bezel and a small blue light illuminates when it’s activated. The quality from the 2-megapixel image proved smooth and sharp in Skype.

Connectivity is generous, with three USB ports on offer, two on the left and one on the right, and there’s also VGA and an SD card slot, as well as headphone and microphone slots and a Kensington lock slot. There’s an Ethernet port too, and impressively, it’s Gigabit rated, so if you need to transfer a large amount of data from the corporate network it won’t take too long. There’s plenty of space if you need to do this, thanks to the hefty Seagate Momentus 250GB hard disk inside, which formats down to 232GB under Windows XP.

Naturally, therefore there’s Draft-n Wi-Fi to go along with this, as well as Bluetooth and just as you’d find on any high falutin’ laptop, there’s a switch to toggle the wireless on and off right at the front of the machine.

What would really top off this machines connectivity would be built-in mobile broadband, and indeed it is available as an option though it wasn’t integrated into our review sample.

As mentioned, Window XP was the OS on our review sample, despite the presence of a Windows Vista Basic sticker on the top. If you’re buying from HP or a reseller, you’re likely to be able to choose, and indeed Ubuntu Linux is supported as an option.

Powering the whole caboodle is Intel’s ubiquitous Atom processor, here in 1.66GHz N280 guise. Problems with just one of our six tests in our benchmarking suite prevented us from obtaining an overall score, (we’ll update when fixed) but with 1GB of RAM, you know what you’re going to get from a machine like this in terms of performance. It’s perfectly fine for all the basic tasks we threw at it, but it’s only when you have multiple applications going on the go that it starts to feel sluggish.

Overall, we were highly enamoured with the HP Mini 5101 and was all set to the best netbook we’ve yet seen by far. However, it did however blot its copybook in one key area - battery life. While it’s not awful, the three hours 57 minutes we obtained in our light use test is not outstanding, nor the two hours 10 from the heavy use test. The solution then is to pick up a long-life battery from HP, though that will inevitably have an affect on size, weight and of course cost, as that will cost you an extra £100 or so.

Indeed the latter is another issue – this level of quality doesn’t come cheap, and even without 3G this version costs over £360. That puts it out of the running as the best value machine, but if it’s a premium quality machine you’re after, and cost be damned, then this is the netbook to get, as long as you also pick up a long-life battery as the same time.

Author: Benny Har-Even

HP Mini 5101 netbook review