Great screen

Photographers looking for a mobile digital darkroom should take note; the high resolution screen makes mobile Photoshopping a reality, and with the inclusion of an SD card slot, powered USB socket and a 120GB hard drive as standard, there’s a huge amount more scope for backing up and storing batches of images on the move than with the EeePC’s 20GB SSD.

Similarly, if you’re looking for a sub-notebook in order to do any kind of writing, the search ends here.

While the EeePC had us screwing our hands into claw shapes to type, the Mini-Note’s ‘borderless’ keyboard is a dream to type on. There’s simply no compromise when typing; it feels more natural than many full-size notebooks, with concave keys guiding your fingertips as you glide over them, providing just the right amount of feedback with minimal travel.

And if you need to get that finished document to where it has to go quickly, there’s a very welcome ExpressCard 54 slot on the side of the Mini-Note, just waiting for a 3G wireless internet card.

Not good for video

As a portable media player, however, the Mini-Note falls flat. The 1.2Ghz processor struggles to play full-screen video at anything beneath ‘high performance’ mode, which reduces battery life considerably.

At full speed, and provided you don’t do too much in the background, DivX-encoded movies and QuickTime trailers will play with no noticeable frame rate loss, though YouTube videos are very choppy under Vista due to the processor-intensive Flash decoding required.

It’s worth noting that 'downgrading’ the 1.2Ghz Mini-Note to Windows XP clears up a lot of such issues.

Video is sharp and colourful thanks to the gorgeously-high PPI 1280x768 resolution, glossy display, but don’t expect to take advantage of the Mini-Note’s screen resolution with any high definition content – the VIA Chrome9 graphics chipset simply isn’t powerful enough for anything much higher than 480p.

Battery life a concern

In normal desktop tasks, though, it makes a world of difference, even compared to the EeePC 900’s 9” screen; the extra resolution brings its screen real estate close to those twice the size. It’s not as bright as we’d hoped, and while it’s perfectly viewable, the option for one more step of brightness wouldn’t go amiss in lighter environments.

The stereo speakers flanking the panel are equally worthy, making up for a lack of bass with detail-laden volume that never sounds distorted.

Battery life is perhaps our biggest concern with the Mini-Note; with the processor clocked at half speed and the brightness set to 70% using Vista’s power management options, we were rewarded with just over four hours of battery life from the larger –and heavier - six cell battery.

Hot case

This is fine if you’re browsing the web or writing spreadsheets, but you’ll struggle to play a film full-screen with the processor at half speed, and turning up the power means the Mini-Note will be dead before the credits roll.

Our other concern is heat, though this is evidently a design decision; place the Mini-Note on your lap and you’ll soon know about it. Like Apple’s metal-bodied notebooks, the Mini-Note’s shell is used to dissipate heat, and while it’s certainly no worse than Apple’s Macbook Air, it’s still not quite the cool and comfortable little computer we might have imagined.

Final verdict

When the Eee PC came out, we set aside a little portion of our salaries, awaiting the results of a backlash from other manufacturers.

The HP Mini-Note is firm proof that it’s been worth the wait – it’s a radical step up from the Eee PC in build quality, and despite the inflated asking price, there are few who will disagree after seeing it face to face that the extra hasn’t been put to good use.

It’s just an enormous shame that the 1.6Ghz version won’t be released in the UK, as internally, the slower processor puts it far behind the Eee PC’s Intel processor when it comes to video and multi-tasking.

The UK editions are still very capable sub-notebooks, but as upstanding British citizens, we can’t help but feel a little cheated.