HP’s New Mini-Notebook Gets Panned

Ever since the ASUS Eee PC stole our hearts, we’ve been longing for a similar product with a few extra features such as an ExpressCard slot and more storage. When we hear about HP’s 2133 we were certainly eager to see how it’d stack up. Sadly, it seems that the VIA CPU isn’t winning it many benchmarks:

"On paper the 1.6GHz VIA C7-M processor should provide excellent speed for general computing tasks," said Notebook Review's JerryJ. "In reality, web pages rendered slower than expected, multi-tasking was painfully slow, and most processor-hungry applications like Photoshop or video encoding software just didn't like the VIA processor."

The rumor going around pre-launch is that HP might launch 2 versions of the mini-notebook, one powered by VIA and the more expensive by Intel. It could simply be that HP is working on either an Atom powered version or a more traditional ULV-Core CPU-powered version. We’re hoping that this is one of those rumors that comes true because the 2113 is certainly an attractive mini-notebook and other than the platform, it has a lot going for it.