If you’re not concerned with looks or fancy extras, your eye may be drawn to the HP Mini 110. At only £216 inc VAT complete with Windows 7, it’s cheap even by netbook standards.
At first, it’s unclear why. It’s plain, but the keyboard feels comfortable, with a good solid base and a light, crisp action, and the keys are nicely spaced. The touchpad is responsive and predictable, and there’s nothing major missing in terms of ports: the Mini 110 has an SD/MMC slot, three USB 2 sockets and even Bluetooth.
Examine it more closely, however, and you'll see where the cuts have been made. The core specifications are basic, with a single-core 1.66GHz Atom and Intel’s GMA 3150 graphics. This gave it a score of only 0.17 in our real world benchmarks.
Coupled with the basic graphics, this doesn’t bode well for gaming and video streaming; you can forget all about smooth, full-screen YouTube HD or BBC iPlayer playback.
The 1,024 x 600 matte display can’t match the best either, and its maximum brightness of 220cd/m2 and contrast ratio of 252:1 mean images look wan.
But the HP’s weakest link is its 2,550mAh battery. It lasted a mere 4hrs 35mins in our light-use test.
With that kind of weakness we couldn't recommend the HP Mini 110 outright, but that price means we can't write it off completely. It's a perfectly usable netbook that undercuts the competition, so if all you want it for is basic web browsing, it's not such a bad deal at all.
Author: Sasha Muller
PCPro
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