The HP Mininote has faded into the background recently due to the hype over Acer, ASUS, MSI and Dell netbooks but remains a favourite in terms of design. A quick poll on the live session the other night revealed that the majority of chat room members think its the best looking of all the netbooks. I tend to agree. As a netbook, its very attractive. The original target market though was schools and that’s why it was built to spec, with its tough chassis and splashproof keyboard, rather than a price.

According to HP’s Jerry Chong, (commercial notebooks business development manager) HP will offer a cheaper version. There’s no word about the possible changes in it but what Yahoo are saying about removing the ruggedness, sounds about right. Maybe it will be a lot lighter too which will be a nice side-effect.

The question remains though about weather HP will re-visit the CPU. If Intel drops a near-ready Diamondville board on their doorstep at a good price and VIA aren’t ready with Nano, it would make sense to go with Atom. Why? Because reports are coming in from all over the place that Atom is doing a great job with Vista. I’m even experiencing it myself here with the M912X. More about that later though.

Coming up in the next 24-hours, Ben’s review of the HP Mininote. In the meantime, you can brush up on HP Mininote specs in the HP Mininote product page.