HP has begun taking orders for the HP Pavilion dv2. The notebook is quite clearly not a netbook. But with a 12 inch screen and a starting weight of 3.8 pounds, it’s designed to appeal to many of the people who were looking at netbooks for their portability, but wanted a bit more power.
This computer is the first to use AMD’s new Neo platform which bundles a reasonably powerful CPU with higher performance graphics than you’ll find in most Intel Atom-based netbooks. It also has a 320GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon HD 3410 GPU with 512MB of video memory, a DVD-RW drive, and 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi. The screen displays 1280 x 800 pixels and the whole computer measures 11.5″ x 9.45″ x 1.29″. It’s big for a netbook, but small for a laptop.
The Pavilion dv2 has a starting price of $749.99 and HP says it’s ready to ship immediately. I’m still waiting for HP to send me a review unit, but in the meantime you can check out some reviews and first impressions from the following sites:
- PC World – No problems running Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit, HD video playback is smooth, similar keyboard to those found on the HP Mini netbook series
- Laptop Magazine – The Pavilion dv2 scores much higher than most netbooks on graphics benchmarks, but not dramatically higher on CPU performance tests
- CNET – Unboxing photos, plus comparison with the Dell Inspiron Mini 12
I’m intrigued by HP and AMD’s assertion that here’s room in the market for a device that’s larger, more powerful, and more expensive than a netbook, but still cheaper than a premium ultraportable laptop. But it remains to be seen whether customers will flock to a $750 PC that weighs 4 pounds when it’s not that hard to find a 5 or 6 pound laptop that’s much more powerful for around $500 or $600. There’s a part of me that thinks that people are willing to look at 3 pound, 10 inch netbooks and look at them as a different class of device from full sized laptops, while a 12 inch, 4 pound machine looks too much like a full sized laptop to avoid being compared to one.
Oh AMD. Would that you’d just send down one of your older duron chips to the netbook market. Add in an integrated 3200 graphics chip(Easier now that you’ve launched your love 4000 series laptop chips), and you could do SO MUCH to repair your financial problems.
A man can dream, can’t he?
It’s not “small” for a laptop, for me 12 inch is the sweet spot :P. However, it should be under 3 lbs to make me happy ….
price point, price point, price point, I for one would love the tx2000 but since I cant afford it I am going with one of the new relatively high power netbook. I would love a 12 in netbook but $300 is my limit. Everyone has there budget and more options mean better products.
unless you are talking about cars when each product takes billions to design. Laptops I would say are relatively easy to redesign and therefore i eagerly await all the new designs and let the shoppers vote with their money on which ones to build.
I’d be interested to know the battery life on this little beauty. It would be hard to trade my 3lb, 10″ Eee PC 1000HE for anything that didn’t give me 6-8 good hours of mobile work time at this point!
Reviews have clocked in around 3-3.5 hours with general use (i.e., video (not HD content I think), chat, web, et cetera) on the standard 4 cell battery. Not sure about larger battery availability or weight.
Does anyone know if the ~4lbs being reported is unit weight or inclusive of the power adapter and DVD drive?
Let me know if your review unit slips out of the return box while packing. 😉
It would be a neat contest prize.