Asus has a lot to answer for.

Its original Eee PC sub-notebook, announced just under a year ago, has leapt off shelves - watched with great interest by a growing number of notebook manufacturers.

One year of development on, we're starting to see these manufacturers' attempts to match the Eee PC's portability, low price point and general loveableness come to fruition.

A few such notebooks have passed largely unnoticed, but none since the original Eee have been greeted with quite such excitement as HP's offering; the Mini-Note.

Not just for kids

The company insists that the Mini-Note has been designed primarily for education, and though we'll accept that as a starting point, we struggle to believe that every design decision was made so that little Eric could do all his homework on the bus and still have room in his bag for his lunch box.

Take the curvaceous magnesium alloy shell, the near full-sized keyboard or the stunning high-resolution glossy screen.

The rock-solid build quality means it’s quite a lot heavier than its rivals – not particularly schoolchild friendly - and aesthetically, it’s a far cry from the creaky white plastic Eee PCs gracing the shelves of Toys R Us or the One Laptop Per Child association’s toy-like XO-1.

It begs to be kept wrapped in microfibre cloth, protected from wayward compasses and pencil sharpeners that may compromise its beauty. Its looks beg comparison with the Macbook Air, and remind us of the form factor we all hoped for from Apple. It’s simply too exquisite – too adult – to have been built for the classroom.

Slow for the UK

In order to bring the product to market as soon as possible, HP has opted to use VIA’s single-core C7-M processor; a processor family as sluggish as it is dated.

The UK seems to have been dealt a poor hand with the Mini-Note; while US buyers can choose from a number of customised editions, our choice is simply ‘Linux’ or ‘Windows Vista’.

For us Brits, there’s very little reason to opt for the latter; the processor is the same paltry 1.2Ghz chip as the Linux version, with no sign of the 1.6Ghz model in the UK.

Slow processor

It’s a huge shame, as while the extra memory and larger six-cell battery of the higher-end UK model does go some way to making up the speed differential, the ‘upgrade’ to Windows Vista is hardly worth paying for.

Vistaon the Mini-Note is like putting Pavarotti behind the wheel of a two-seat convertible; he'll get from A to B, but the extra bloat means he's not the best man for the job.

But that's the thing - it does get from A to B. Having read preliminary reports, we were expecting performance under Vista to be simply ludicrous, with Vista’s interface rendered pixel by pixel.

Downgrade to Windows XP

In reality, in everyday web browsing, working with Microsoft Office 2007 and playing videos, it’s no slower than a low-end Celeron notebook for the same price.

In the US, HP is offering a 'downgrade to Windows XP' option - we presume the word 'downgrade' is only used to keep Microsoft happy, as for all intents and purposes you'll be giving your Mini-Note a new lease of life by switching to Microsoft's older, wiser operating system.

That said, those looking for a real-world example of the Mini-Note’s abilities under Windows Vista will find comfort in the following: What was originally thought to be a suicide mission ended in tremendous satisfaction after we installed Adobe Lightroom and successfully developed a batch of five 8Mbit Canon RAW images with negligible wait time between adjustments.