Netbook Review: HP Mini 311

Screenwise, bigger is better. Once your buddy's invited you over to watch the game on his 50-inch flat screen, your 32-inch TV will look puny forevermore. A movie in IMAX packs a bigger wallop than anything else at your local megaplex. And in a sea of netbooks, most with 10.1-inch displays, an extra inch and a half makes a surprisingly likable difference.

To be sure, no one is going to mistake the 11.6-inch screen of the HP Mini 311 for IMAX. But it's sunny and sharp, with crisp colors (as long as you stick to the top couple of brightness settings), and its 1,366 by 768 resolution is noticeably more roomy than the 1,024 by 600 pixels of most 10.1-inch ultraportables. Web pages and applications don't appear squashed or truncated, and there's room for 720p high-definition videos.

There's sufficient video processing power for 720p videos, too, thanks to Nvidia's Ion graphics platform, a replacement for the wretched GMA 950 integrated graphics of most first-generation Intel Atom netbooks.

The Mini 311 uses the original, system-memory-borrowing Ion, not the faster, dedicated-memory Ion 2 that premiered earlier this week at the CeBIT trade show. It's not strong enough to play the latest, most gorgeous games (although it'll play older ones at low resolution; Quake III Arena managed 117 frames per second at 1,024 by 768), and it's not a CAD powerhouse (it took the same eternity, about 18 minutes, to render Cinebench R10's sample scene as GMA 950 netbooks, and eked out 4 fps in Cinebench R11.5's OpenGL test).

But it played video clips smoothly, without a stutter, and it cruised to a solid score of 1,208 at native resolution in 3DMark06, topping not only GMA 950 netbooks but full-size notebooks with Intel's GMA 4500-family graphics. Like the slightly plus-sized screen, the Ion graphics make a noticeable difference in your enjoyment of the HP.

Not Your Average Netbook

Another enjoyable feature, though not a plus-sized one, is the Mini's keyboard. A fraction smaller than desktop size -- the A through apostrophe keys span 7.5 instead of 8 inches -- it offers an intuitive layout (with Ctrl and Delete keys in their respective proper places at bottom left and top right); a comfortable typing feel; and a smooth-gliding touchpad. The touchpad is a little short vertically (1.5 by 3.25 inches), but its buttons are correctly placed beneath it rather than on either side as with HP's first Minis.

The 311 is an easy-to-carry 3.3 pounds and measures 8 by 11.4 by 1.2 inches. On the right side are two USB 2.0, Ethernet, and VGA ports; a microphone/headphone jack; and an SD/MMC/xD/MS flash-card reader. A third USB port and an HDMI port, speaking of HD video, are at the left.

Under the hood is Intel's Atom N270, a 1.6GHz single-core, dual-threaded (Hyper-Threading) processor with 512K of Level 2 cache. As with the Ion, this is a first-generation part, not one of the fractionally faster "Pine Trail" Atom N450s introduced around New Year's. One gigabyte of memory and a 160GB hard drive are standard, as is Windows XP Home Edition.

The Mini motored to a PCMark Vantage benchmark score of 1,001, on par with most other netbooks. Our real-world work sessions averaged four and a half hours of battery life -- not exceptional, but perfectly adequate considering the HP's sleekly flush-fitting, versus some netbooks' protruding or prop-up, battery packs.

If we had to name one gripe about the Mini 311, it would be that with 10.1-inch netbooks now selling for less than $300, it's a bit pricey at $400 -- for our test unit, $455, thanks to Windows 7 Home Premium instead of Win XP.

There are a variety of build-to-order options, ranging from $20 for a white- instead of black-swirly-patterned lid to $30 for 2GB of memory and the same for a 250GB hard disk (or a hefty $210 for an 80GB solid-state drive). But as nice as the 11.6-inch screen and Ion graphics adapter are, we'd vote for a price premium of $50 to $70 rather than a full $100, at least until the Ion 2 version arrives.

No mistake, though, the screen is nice. In terms of going back to our old netbook, the Mini 311 has made us grouchier than any product has for some time.