JVC Mobile Mini Note PC Review

Mini Laptop, Maxi Price

Business travel seems to grow more tedious and time-consuming with every trip: more hours in airports, more time shuffling in various lines with a briefcase or carry-on strap digging into your shoulder.

Perhaps these wearying realities inspired Japanese electronics maker JVC, a company better known in North America for boomboxes and TV sets than computers, to offer its $2,400 model MP-XV841US, a.k.a. Mobile Mini Note PC. The Mini Note is a tiny but capable system that sets itself apart from most other flyweight subnotebooks by including a built-in DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

In fact, this unit is almost as much a portable DVD player as it is a PC, boasting a solid three-hour battery life when watching movies -- and almost seven hours when used for PC functions. This is great if you have a long layover or don't like the flicks offered on your flight.

Sizing It Up

The JVC's physical design is also reminiscent of portable DVD players. At a time when 17-inch LCDs and ultra-thin form factors are all the rage, the Mini Note offers a seemingly undersized 8.9-inch-diagonal, wide-aspect-ratio (1,024 by 600) display and a stubby body. At 8.4 by 9.3 by 1.7 inches, it tucks neatly into a portfolio or purse, and at 3.25 pounds, it weighs about the same as many notebooks that don't have DVD or CD drives.

JVC chose to use an IBM ThinkPad-style pointing stick -- a little rubbery nubbin that sits in the middle of the keyboard -- as the pointing device. Most notebook designers have dropped this mouse substitute in favor of touchpads, but given its diminutive dimensions, this unit may not have been able to accommodate one.

The biggest irritation is the keyboard. Given the Mini Note's width, there just isn't room for a full-sized array of keys -- the JVC's are about the size of Chiclets, with the function keys even tinier, and a pitch or key-to-key spacing of 16mm (versus your desktop keyboard's 19mm and some other subnotebooks' 17mm). You can touch-type on this machine, even with fat fingers like mine, but you'll make plenty of mistakes.

That said, it's still infinitely easier than typing on a Blackberry or other handheld computer, which may have been part of the thinking behind the JVC design: The Mini Note makes an interesting (if much more expensive) alternative to PDAs for people who need to do more input- and processor-intensive work while mobile, beyond just reading and answering e-mails.

As a PC, the Windows XP Professional-based notebook stacks up reasonably well against other ultralight laptops and goes way beyond handhelds: It features Intel's 1.0GHz ultra-low-voltage Pentium M processor with 400MHz front-side bus; 256MB of memory expandable to 768MB; a 40GB, 4,200-rpm hard disk; and Intel's Centrino-brand 855GME integrated-graphics chipset and built-in 802.11b/g wireless networking. The latter worked flawlessly on my home-office network at initial startup.

JVC touts the screen's ability to act as a scrolling or panning window on a 2,048 by 1,536-pixel virtual display, but considering its petite size, this is still not a computer you'll want to use for hours at a time. Text is just too small, and if you enlarge it using JVC's zoom function -- which is easy to do in Word, for example -- you won't get much of it on the screen.

Still, I found the Mini Note perfectly adequate for light word processing or working with small spreadsheets. Certainly the processing power, memory, and storage are equal to standard productivity applications.

Sufferin' Software

The Mini Note comes loaded with software related to its multimedia functions -- WinDVD 5 for playing DVDs (even HDTV content) and Pinnacle Studio 9 for editing digital video -- but it's a little light on business software; you don't even get Microsoft Works.

Most of the system's premium hardware features also relate more to its multimedia functions -- a Firewire port for copying digital video from a camcorder (as well as two USB 2.0 ports); a Secure Digital slot for transferring pictures from a digital-camera memory card; play, pause, forward, and back buttons that control DVD play and the tiny, tinny-sounding stereo speakers.

We're not quite sure why JVC places so much emphasis on video editing, which is more within the realm of high-end desktop PCs. Still, if you use video in your business presentations, you could use the Mini Note to do last-minute edits to customize a clip for a particular PowerPoint show.

I'm no video connoisseur, but the DVD movies I played on the Mini Note looked good -- the LCD is small, but big enough when it's as close to your eyes as it is with the unit in your lap, and very sharp and clear with crisp color. I saw none of the image flaws or hiccups in playback that sometimes result from using underpowered PCs to play DVDs.

The Bottom Line

The Mini Note isn't very practical as a first computer, although you could buy a full-size keyboard, mouse, and monitor and use it at the office. Its Ethernet port and wireless network interface let you connect to the office LAN without a problem, and JVC supplies software that simplifies changing your network connection -- useful when you're visiting a branch office or customer's office or using a WiFi hotspot.

Overall, JVC's subnotebook is an attractive but pricey product. Unless you really need the features the Mini Note offers, you can spend a lot less money; I recently bought a traveling computer with about the same weight and processing power as this one, but without a CD or DVD drive, for about $1,000. And if you must watch movies on the plane, Sony's Vaio TR3 and Fujitsu's LifeBook P7000, like the JVC, weigh just over 3 pounds apiece with DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, but offer larger 10.6-inch screens for $100 to $300 less.

Adapted from SmallBusinessComputing.com.