Review - HP Buying Experience and 110XP

[ThisIsNot]

My camera is a pocket Sony Cyber-Shot. I have a DSLR at work that takes great pictures but the other person I work with took it home. So I had to use my 10.1 MP Cyber-Shot camera with a weak flash. I am thinking about purchasing a new digital camera but I don't like having those big DSLR's (and larger styles). I like being able to put my camera in my pocket and move on. Plus, I can take small cameras like that into concerts without issues. I am afraid that a light tent, backdrops, and other accessories are beyond my budget and what I need. Kind of like purchasing an H1 just to go back and forth from work (that is 3 miles away).

Yes, the screen drops in the back just like the old 12" PowerBook. I took pictures of the back but they all came out blurry. For some reason, my camera can't focus on the back (even in macro mode). There aren't any vents back there. I should further clarify that the speakers are actually on the bottom of the LCD panel. I thought I examined the netbook up and down, I guess not. The speakers are still pretty powerful though. This is the first notebook/netbook I have in which the screen drops down below the body of the notebook/netbook. I like the design and, when the panel is all the way up, it makes for a comfortable viewing experience.

Battery Performance:
This is where the HP Mini 110 falls short when compared to the Asus Eee PC 1000HE, 1005HA, and even the 1008HA in some regards. I ran numerous battery tests in order to test the 6-cell battery. The first test I did was basic internet surfing. I checked my e-mail, visited netbookreviews.com, and so on. The backlight was at a full 100% and wi-fi was turned on. It took the netbook 3 hours and 35 minutes before it had to be shut down. I ran the same test with the screen backlight set to 50% and it was able to last for 5 hours and 15 minutes. The backlight was decreased to the lowest level and operation time was increased to a little over 6 hours.

The second test I ran was centered on more Flash heavy internet browsing. 100% backlight resulted in 3 hours of operation, 50% produced 4 hours and 10 minutes of run time, and the lowest backlight setting allowed the unit to run for 4 hours and 45 minutes. One has to remember that Flash is a resource hog and processor usage was normally at around 50% almost the entire time. That still isn’t bad but the numbers aren’t near the Eee PC 1000HE or 1005HA.

I want to run two more battery tests. I will be doing those tomorrow and Friday. I should then be able to come up with an overall conclusion either Friday evening or Saturday. I want to finish this review as work starts next week. I am will be going to class tomorrow but I am only taking two classes this semester: one on Tuesday-Thursdays and another on Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Luckily each class is only 50 minutes and takes place after work.

Your camera is great. I was looking at one this week. What I'm talking about is a way to put light on the subject.

Here's a DIY lightbox article using a collapsable cardboard box. Another DIY lightbox article made from take apart PVC tubes.

The small cost is for the poster board used as a background and the gauze fabric used on the sides of the cardboard box. Point your desk lamp at the light tent and don't use the flash on the camera. PVC is slightly more cost.

I buy my desk lamp bulbs with a whitish light instead of the yellowish light. That's it. Inexpensive and affordable like the netbook.

Originally Posted by ThisIsNot

My camera is a pocket Sony Cyber-Shot. I have a DSLR at work that takes great pictures but the other person I work with took it home. So I had to use my 10.1 MP Cyber-Shot camera with a weak flash.

[ThisIsNot]

I ran some more general benchmarks, I still haven't finished the battery tests yet. I ran some media encoding tests. I randomly selected 100 songs from my Apple Lossless (ALAC) library for encoding. I used dBpowerAMP to convert the files using various encoders. The only one I couldn't do this for was with iTunes AAC, I had to use iTunes for the encoding process. I further used handbrake to encode an mpeg-4 AVC video and Windows Movie Maker to encode a WMV VC-1 video.

• Boot time (after uninstalling all the crap I didn't want and installed everything that I actually wanted): 25 seconds.
• Sleep time: 1 second or less.
• Wake up time: 5 seconds or less.
• iTunes AAC encoding (from ALAC files): average speed of 20x
• iTunes mp3 encoding (from ALAC files): average speed of 28x
• Lame mp3 encoding (from ALAC files): average speed of 17x
• Nero AAC encoding (from ALAC files): average speed of 22x
• mpeg-4 AVC video encoding (640X480, 1.5Mbps, 128kbps AAC stereo audio from a 640X480 4Mbps mpeg-2 video with AC3 5.1 audio): average speed of 12x
• WMV VC-1 encoding (640X480, 1.5Mbps, 128kbs WMApro stereo audio from the same mpeg-2 video): average speed of 10x
• mpeg-2 encoding (640X480, 3Mbps, 192kbps mpeg-2 audio from a 640X480 DVI-AVI video with uncompressed audio): average speed of 20x
• AVG Free deep virus scan (9GB of data): 1 hour and 45 minutes

[ThisIsNot]

The third round of battery tests that I conducted were with iTunes running in the background (playing music through earbud headphones off of an SDHC card, not my USB hard drive) while Word was open. Wi-fi was turned off and I used the same previous screen backlight settings. 100% backlight allowed the netbook to operate for 3.5 hours, 50% backlight resulted in 5 hours and 40 minutes of usage, and the lowest backlight setting produced a time of 6 hours and 15 minutes.

The last round of battery tests was with a 1080p video. I wanted to see how much power the Broadcom Crystal HD Accelerator used. I turned wi-fi off, used the same three backlight settings, loaded up the ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre application, and set things up so that it would repeat a playlist of 1080p videos (all encoded at 8Mbps, mpeg-4 AVC, with 128kbps stereo audio playing through earbud headphones). The full backlight setting resulted in 3 hours and 23 minutes of usage, 50% backlight was able to get 5 hours and 19 minutes, and the lowest backlight setting allowed me to watch the videos for 6 hours and 11 minutes. It turns out that Broadcom’s claims were true: their Crystal HD chip uses little to now power. That really surprised me.

So you can see that the HP Mini 110 is not the most power efficient model out there but I feel that 5-6 hours of real world usage is more than enough to get the job done especially considering that I will probably never sit there for 5-6 straight hours using the netbook.

Conclusion:
Given the price I paid for this netbook, I am pretty pleased and would easily recommend it to other people. 1080p video playback is silky smooth and video output quality matches that of my PS3. The high resolution (1366X768) LCD panel is bright and produces solid colors. Heat is not an issue with the actual netbook. Battery performance could be better but it is comparable to other 10.1” models from Acer. The included 16GB SSD drive is not the fastest either but I have yet to come across an issue involving the speed. The Atom N280 processor is solid when it comes to multi-tasking but I don’t think that it is noticeably faster than the Atom N270 processor. Even advanced users would be hard pressed to notice differences in day-to-day activities. My main complaints about the Mini 110 are the trackpad and 0.3 MP built-in webcam (it should be 1.3 MP). I am giving this netbook a total score of 9 out of 10. I had to knock it down a few notches due to the webcam, trackpad, and the difficulty in upgrading internal hardware (except for the RAM).

Pros:
• 1080p video playback is great.
• One of the best, if not the best, netbook screens I have ever seen.
• Heat is not an issue.
• Stylish LCD lid.
• Great battery life when playing back HD videos.
• RAM was easy to upgrade.

Cons:
• Upgrading hard drive requires disassembly
• Trackpad is terrible.
• Internet browsing battery life could be better.
• 0.3 MP built-in webcam.


That is it. I will come back after a few weeks of owning the netbook to state my opinions. I am sure that there are some flaws (and more pros) that I just don't see right now as the netbook is still less than a week old.

Edit: I wanted to mention one more thing. I just plugged in my Xbox 360's HD-DVD drive to playback a ~40 Mbps VC-1 and a ~35-40 Mbps mpeg-4 AVC movie on my netbook. Everything worked great. CPU usage jumped a little bit to 20% but it went back down. I was also running a program that monitored the processor. For the most part, the processor was running at 900MHz instead of 1.66GHz. It started off at 1.66GHz whenever ArcSoft's TotalMedia Theatre first opened but then it went back down to 900MHz in less than a minute. That shows you how powerful Broadcom's Crystal HD accelerator is.

I picked up on the free tests you were running on your new HP netbook and tried them on my ASUS netbooks. Thanks for what you are doing to help.

Some apps and tests may cost money but I haven't gotten to that level yet. I've found online tests, free diagnostic tests and downloads along with test discussion groups.

Thanks for your help.