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Like many netbooks, the HP Mini 210 ships with both Windows 7 Starter Edition and a quick-boot operating system. The quick boot option in this case is based on DeviceVM’s Splashtop, but it’s designed to look a lot like the Mi Edition Linux environment that HP designed for the HP Mini 1000 Mi Edition.

HP is no longer shipping a consumer oriented Linux-only netbok option. You can order the HP Mini 5102 and other business oriented netbooks with SUSE Linux.

NDevil has posted a hands-on video showcasing the quick boot software on the HP Mini 210. The OS really does boot in just under 10 seconds. That’s the good news. The silly news is that once you click any program it’ll take another 10 seconds or so to launch. This is something I’ve also noticed on other netbooks with SplashTop.

The quick boot operating system includes a web browser, email client, music and video player and an image viewer, among other apps. You can configure the software to start every time you boot your computer, or you can bypass SplashTop and boot straight into Windows 7.

You can check out nDevil’s video after the break. He also has another video showing the editing pictures in Photoshop, playing a game, and struggling with HD Flash video. I’ll toss that in for good measure.

He also reports that there’s at least one major problem with the touchpad. Because the left and right buttons are integrated into the touchpad, you have to be very careful with the way you hold your fingers over the touchpad. If you’re used to hovering one finger over the touchpad and another over the buttons, you may end up watching the cursor jump from one end of the display to the other just before you meant to click a button. I noticed the same problem with the Dell Inspiron Mini 10v and Inspiron 11z notebooks, both of which also have integrated touchpad buttons. I really wish PC makers would stop trying to save space by using integrated butons.