Welcome to this week’s netbook roundup. In this space every Monday I’ll highlight netbook news items that might not need their own individual posts but may still be interesting.

• Dell Mini 10 Unboxed, Compared to HP Mini 1000 – A nice unboxing of the Dell Mini 10 [Portal page], and comparison to the HP Mini 1000. I still haven’t gotten my hands on a Mini 10 so this video was quite appetizing.

• Gigabyte Promotional Videos for Upcoming Netbooks – Liliputing points out three videos released by Gigabyte on YouTube which promote their upcoming netbooks.

• Rumor: Verizon and HP Readying Subsidized Netbooks – Cheap netbooks due to subsidizes from cell phone carriers are fairly common outside the US, but it seems like HP might be teaming up with Verizon to offer a discount on a netbook if the consumer wants to start a Verizon contract. If this comes to fruition, we’ll probably see a USB WWAN card offered with the netbook, but I think most of us are hoping for a more elegant internal solution.

• How to: Touch to Eee PC 1000HE – Jkk points us to a video tutorial that shows you how to add a touchscreen to the Eee PC 1000HE [Portal page].

• Asus Eee PC T101H at CeBIT 2009 – A late CeBIT video from Jkk. Jkk gives us the run down on the tablet-netbook, Eee PC T101H [Portal page].

So as I mention in the video, this was easier to explain with a video than writing it, so consider this a video post!

How about you dear readers; what is your preference on hinge strength and what advantages does it offer?

I was able to get XP on the Mini 1000 [Portal page][review] and I did a quick Crystal Mark benchmark. This is a fully updated SP3 machine. Here are the results:

The HDD score is disappointing. The HP Mini 1000 that I have has a 16GB SSD, and that should be at least as fast as a standard 1.8” HDD, but it scores pretty below that level. Not too bad otherwise considering the price of the hardware, and the build quality of the unit, but it is still kind of sad that my UX180 scores slightly better than this, is much smaller, and gets about the same amount of battery life. Sure, the UX180 was really expensive when it came out several years ago, but today you can buy one for a similar price as the HP Mini 1000.

The Mini 1000 is definitely targeted as a secondary computer. I find that it works well as an around-the-house computer for staying connected through social networks and doing light web browsing.

Welcome to this week’s netbook roundup. In this space every Monday I’ll highlight netbook news items that might not need their own individual posts but may still be interesting.

• Black Samsung NC10 now shipping, slightly cheaper — The slightly modified black Samsung NC10 [Portal page] with larger trackpad is now shipping and can be bought for less.

• Dell Inspiron Mini 10 Review — Laptop Mag reviews the Dell Mini 10 [Portal page]. “Dell’s first 10-inch netbook has a compact chassis, good keyboard, and a crisp 10-inch display, but we wish it offered better battery life for the price”.

• New Acer netbook hits the FCC web site — Looks like there might be a different new Aspire One 10″ netbook in the works. FCC docs give a few hints.

• HP Now Offers Extended Battery for the HP Mini 1000 — HP has released the extended battery for the HP Mini 1000 [Portal page][Review]. It will run you $119.

• First look at the Eee PC 1008HA’s Eee Dock app – Video — The upcoming Eee 1008HA has some Asus built software that gets demoed on video at CeBIT 09.

I’ve just finished up the last section of the Mini 1000 MIE review. The review was done in rolling format, so each section came out at different times over the last few weeks. This post serves as a hub to access all of our Mini 1000 MIE review articles as well as any additional Mini 1000 MIE coverage that we put up while testing the unit.

Summary

The HP Mini 1000 MIE is a good choice if you are looking for a netbook. Wonderful hardware design and a very reasonable price make this netbook a respectable piece of machinery. It is important to keep in mind that netbooks aren’t as powerful as normal laptops, but the Mini 1000 MIE will work well for those that need a web browsing and light productivity tool, and want it to be small and portable.

The Mini 1000′s keyboard is large and has been very well received. The unit itself is very small and light, especially considering the size of the keyboard and screen on it. The only issues you might have with the HP Mini 1000 MIE is that the battery life is not particularly good, around 2 hours and 35 minutes from a full charge (brightness max, Wifi on). A 6-cell extended, albeit ugly, will be available soon to push the battery life up around 5 or so hours. The other problem may be compatibility with the custom Ubuntu OS. While the OS itself works fine for most tasks, many people are used to Windows and might not want to change their computing habits to conform to the different OS. Luckily for you, it is always an option to put Windows XP, or any other OS on it, yourself, or buy the XP version from HP if you’d rather have it done for you.

Check out the coverage below to get a detailed idea of the HP Mini 1000 MIE netbook.

If you are interesting in buying an HP Mini 1000 MIE, or other version (like XP) head over to the portal page to get a full summary of specs and links to places that you can purchase the unit.

Review Coverage

• Unboxing

• Initial software impressions

• Initial hardware impressions

• Performance

• Long term software impressions

• Long term hardware impressions

Additional Coverage

• How To: upgrade RAM in the Mini 1000

• Who is the target audience for the HP Mini 1000 MIE?

• HP Mini 1000 MIE user notes from target audience users

I think I definitely saved the best for last. The HP Mini 1000 is a beautiful unit by anyone’s standards. Combine that with the fact that you can buy a version of the Mini 1000 MIE direct from HP starting at $280, and you should be impressed.

Take a look at the hardware tour:

Left (left to right): A/C plug, USB 2.0, vents, HP accessory connector, standard headphone jack, ethernet port (covered by rubber flap).

Front: Power slider, HDD/battery LED indicators, wireless slider.

Right: SD slot, USB 2.0, recessed USB 2.0 (under cover).

Back: Nothing here but hinge.

Close up of the ethernet port under the rubber cover.

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It has definitely been an interesting testing experience with the Mini 1000 MIE [Portal page]. The netbook, as you have probably read, runs a custom Ubuntu interface designed by HP. They call it the Mobile Internet Edition of the Mini 1000. I am anything but a Linux pro, so I approached this as a newcomer to Linux. Luckily, HP is marketing the Mini 1000 MIE to less experienced computer users and not Linux pros. I gave you my initial software impressions not too long ago, but I’m ready to give you some more detailed information.

Home Screen

Where to start…. The home screen, as we’ve showed you before, does a good job of simplifying the computer experience down to some of the most commonly used activities on a computer. There is easy access to email, web, and photos/music. I have some issues with the home screen though; it seems like it could be set up to make people a bit more productive. My biggest issue is the photos/music section on the right side of the home screen. For some reason this is really unappealing to me. It shows the album art of the last three songs you have played, or the last three photos in your photo library. All it functions as is a shortcut to my photo or music library. Do I really need to have that 1/3 of my home screen experience taken up by the last three photos I put into the library? For some reason it just doesn’t sit right with me, I have no need to say “Hey look, those are the last three photos I took”. If I want to look at my images, I will actually go look at them, looking at thumbnails of the last three that I happened to take really doesn’t do anything productive for me.

I want dynamic information displayed in this extra space that is actually useful. You can squeeze shortcut button to my photos or music somewhere else on the home screen, but it seems like something else in this 1/3 space would be much more beneficial. One of the things I have considered would be weather. It would be really cool to see the current weather, temperature and, the forecast for the next few days. How about severe weather alerts too? Another idea, which could even be in addition to a weather section, would be some stocks. It would be nice to see some graphs of different stocks which could be customized by the user. Of course you could always p00  pull down some recent news from a major news website. This is the kind of dynamic information that I feel would be much more useful in this space rather than simply showing me the last three pictures I took, or the last three songs I’ve listened to.

The Web section of the home screen gives you a URL bar to reach any page, a drop down list of bookmarks, which aren’t easy to navigate if you have a lot of them, and four customizable squares that act as shortcuts to your favorite sites. It would be nice if each of the four site shortcuts had titles so you could see exactly what you were looking at. You can see small thumbnail previews, but all four of my boxes were filled with Google services, and every thumbnail was the Google login screen, I basically had no idea which site I was going to.

The Mail section of the home screen seems good in theory. There is a list of messages from your inbox right on the home screen. Mozilla’s Thunderbird is the application that makes all of this happen, and clicking on one of your messages in the inbox list will launch the application. I tried setting up Thunderbird using the automatic configuration of a Gmail address but it hasn’t worked correctly for me. It wanted to set up a POP connection to my Gmail account and it downloaded some very old emails for some reason. To be honest, I didn’t dig down and properly set up my email with Thunderbird for two reasons. The first of which is that I didn’t want to accidentally download a bunch of emails to the Mini 1000 and mess up the organization of my Gmail inbox. The second reason is that a target Mini 1000 MIE user should not have to dig through configuration options to make their email work, especially if they already specified that they have a Gmail account (it should know how to set it up correctly for them, given the proper credentials). I trust Thunderbird as a reputable email client to be able to be configured correctly for any email account that supports POP or IMAP, but the point remains that it shouldn’t be up to a target Mini 1000 MIE user to have to figure out how all of those ‘behind the scenes’ preferences work.

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