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The HP Mini 5103 is the latest business-class netbook from HP. It follows the HP Mini 5101 and 5102, and for the most part, this model looks a lot like its predecessors. It has an aluminum and magnesium alloy, all-metal case. It comes standard with a 7200RPM hard drive or an optional solid state disk, and options include a high resolution display, a capacitive touchscreen display, or a Broadcom Crystal HD video decoder.

But while the HP Mini 5101 shipped with an Intel Atom N280 CPU and the Mini 5102 came with a choice of an Atom N450 or N470, the HP Mini 5103 is currently available with Atom N455 or N475 chips. The main difference between these processors and earlier ones is support for DDR3 memory, and that hardly seems worth creating a whole new netbook model number. But it looks like HP may have something else up its sleeve.

The folks at Netbook News.de spotted a service manual for the HP Mini 5103 which mentions another option for this netbook: a dual core 1.5GHz Intel Atom N550 processor. That makes sense, since Intel recently announced that the chip would be available in a number of netbooks including models from HP, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Samsung, and others.

The rest of the specs for the new HP Mini 5103 appear to be unchanged, so I think the only major change will be the addition of the new processor. The HP Mini 5103 is already available for purchase from HP.com, but the dual core processor option is nowhere to be seen.