HP Mini 210-2180
- Category: Notebook Computers
February 28, 2011
Editor's Rating
- Many color choices
- Huge battery life
- Spacious keyboard
- Cramped touchpad
- So-so performance
The HP Mini 210-2180 is a netbook that comes in many stylish colors, has a larger-than-average keyboard and has huge battery life. While the internal specifications aren't the latest and greatest, it will still provide average computing performance for the average user.
The HP Mini 210-2180 measures 16.3 x 4.3 x 10.2-inches (lwh) and weighs just shy of 3 pounds, which makes it only slightly heavier and larger than some other netbooks, but it's still extremely portable. It's definitely small enough to fit into a school backpack or business briefcase with ease. This model comes in three different colors: dark gray, blue and pink. Our review unit was the blue color and it was, in our opinion, a very attractive color. The finish on all three models are glossy, but not too much to where fingerprints and smudges are easy to show. The body is made of a lightweight plastic, but it's thick enough to not feel cheap or like it's going to break at any moment.
HP includes a 10.1-inch BrightView LED display with a native resolution of 1024 x 600-pixels, which puts it just short of 720p, but this being a budget netbook, that is to be expected. The quality of the screen is pretty good otherwise, especially for reading text and watching online videos.
One really good perk about this computer that HP should really use to sell this notebook is the spacious keyboard. The chiclet-style keyboard is almost a full-sized keyboard when compared to non-netbook laptops. More so, this keyboard is really comfortable to use. The keys are larger-than-normal and even have a small gap between each key, which really helps to cut down on mistypings and errors. HP was able to do this without sacrificing any key's size, which means you don't get awkwardly sized Shift keys or arrow keys like you will on some other netbooks.
The mouse touchpad, however, is a different story. HP decided to forgo having a click buttons and instead uses a clickpad, which combines the mouse buttons into the trackpad. The pad is multitouch-enabled, so you can do iPhone-like gestures to zoom and scroll. The touchpad is quite undersized, so you'll probably find yourself hitting the edges with your fingers.
In terms of ports on the HP Mini 210-2180, you'll find three USB 2.0 ports, VGA-out, a 5-in-1 memory card reader, Ethernet and a combo headphone/microphone port. There is also built-in 802.11b/g/n wireless connectivity and Bluetooth too, which is a nice added feature.
Internal specifications include an Intel Atom N455 CPU, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a 250GB 7200RPM hard drive and Intel GMA 3150 integrated graphics. This Atom CPU is a single-core processor, which puts it behind dual-core CPUs that are available today in some netbooks. The 1GB of RAM, as opposed to 2GB, also holds it back, but it performs well-enough for Internet browsing, e-mail writing and some light multitasking, but don't expect much more than that. The operating system of choice is Microsoft Windows 7 Starter edition.
Battery power, on the other hand, is a huge selling point at about 9-10 hours of battery life, which blows past pretty much all other competitors. The 6-cell battery that HP provides with the HP Mini 210-2180 is one of the best we've seen in this class of netbooks.
