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HP’s Mini 210 should be boring. Like the Ford Fiesta of the PC world, it’s a point-A-to-B budget box from a well-known manufacturer not particularly well known for taking risks. But also like its automotive doppelganger, the Mini 210 yields some unforeseen surprises. Besides styling that breaks the monotony of countless Taiwanese clones, it sports an exceptionally high resolution display, optional Broadcom video decoder chip, and a touchpad that emulates Apple’s MacBooks. As we found out, that last point proves to be a major – debatably fatal – stumbling block for the Mini 210, but buyers who can learn to live with the mind-bogglingly-bad pad, or spring for a wireless mouse, can learn to cope with an otherwise very well put together netbook.
Toss a couple cheap netbooks in lineup, and we’re guessing even the guys that designed them couldn’t tell their creations apart from 20 feet away. In a field cluttered with knockoffs of knockoffs, the HP Mini 210 with battery such as HP 441132-001 Battery , HP RQ203AA Battery , HP 462891-162 Battery , HP HSTNN-CB30 Battery , HP 372771-001 Battery , HP HSTNN-UB0W Battery , HP 586007-541 Battery , HP 586021-001 Battery , HP TouchSmart tm2 Battery , HP 582213-121 Battery , HP HSTNN-Q46C Battery , HP Mini 210 Battery actually manages to stand apart with a few fresh, practical styling cues, not to mention build quality well above its peers.
The geometric design etched on lid is nothing mindblowing, but it’s dark enough to help hide fingerprints and scuffs, subtle enough to overlook if you don’t care for it, and unlike a vast majority of companies, HP actually carried the same material and pattern over to the belly of the netbook, where you would typically find a black plastic carcass dotted with screws and fan cutouts. HP also offers it in six different colors, two of which come with matching keyboards (white and pink).
Inside, the Mini 210 pulls off a respectable MacBook Pro impression with an attractive slab of edge-to-edge “glass” over the LCD. The wrist rest and other touchy feely parts (including the keys) have been cast in a rubbery feeling black plastic. Although a hump above the keyboard and the crevices between the keys sport a glossy black finish, neither spot managed to actually collect fingerprints during our weeks of testing.
The whole package has a remarkably sturdy feel when closed, without the creaks and rattles you come to expect from a $400 machine, and the screen and keyboard both exhibit minimal flex. The only exception to this almost-German level of build quality? The weight of the extended six-cell battery tends to jiggle around on its rails when you move the Mini 210 quickly.
HP advertises up to four hours and 30 minutes of battery life with the basic three-cell battery. As usual, that proves to be quite optimistic, with the Mini 210 delivering more like three hours and 30 minutes of usable life with brightness to full and Wi-Fi engaged.
After taking in the sleek finish, solid feel, and crisp display, we wanted to love the Mini 210 right out of the box. Sadly, that’s not the end of the story. Its less endearing traits take time to ooze to the surface, and when they do, the honeymoon is over. We could forgive a few extra milliseconds for simple tasks like opening a folder or a browser, and a splashtop OS that doesn’t actually seem to work, but that touchpad is harder to live with than a roommate who watches The Nanny every waking hour with the TV on full blast. This trait alone would have warranted a return from us, had we bought and paid for the Mini 210, and it shows in the final score. If HP can manage to fix this one glaring failure and find a little extra pep, we can see the next iteration being one of our favorite netbooks on the market. But as it stands, recommending any laptop with this touchpad is like recommending a car with a dinner plate for a steering wheel and sandwich for a brake pedal. It works… but not really.