Last Updated
January 18, 2011

Editor's Rating

• Compact, portable design
• Full-sized keyboard
• Excellent performance for value
• Long battery life

• Smaller than average trackpad
• 3G option isn't available yet

AMD's newest line of Fusion CPUs have landed inside one of HP's newest laptops: the Pavilion dm1z. This 11.6-inch laptop has fantastic battery life, excellent performance ratings and a really sleek design. The screen has an HD resolution and the memory is expandable to 8GB, which is huge for a laptop of this size.

The HP Pavilion dm1z measures 11.4 x 8.4 x 0.8-inches (lwh) and weighs about 3.5-pounds, making it extremely lightweight and portable. It's not quite a netbook and isn't branded as one by HP, but in terms of size it almost is, but in terms of performance, it's much more. The design of the dm1z's body is quite sleek and has a nice clean look to it. It's made of plastic and not metal, but the plastic is very hard and almost has the sturdiness of metal with the added weight.

HP uses their CoolSense technology on this lapotp, which couples well-designed internals with a combination of external materials to reduce the head build-up inside. HP designed the main air vents to be located at the back rather than on the bottom, which allows air to be effectively moved away from the laptop and cooling it down more effeciently.

The full-size chiclet-keyboard is quite well-designed and is overall quite comfortable to use. The keys give you enough tactile feedback to type at a comfortable pace without too much pressure or frustration. Because the keyboard is full-size, there's virtually no bezel surrounding them, which might cause problems for some user's fingers missing the keyboard altogether, but it's just a slight learning curve. The multitouch trackpad is a little too small for our liking, but has decent sensitivity and performance.

The 11.6-inch display has a native resolution of 1366 x 768-pixels, which is 720p high-definition and gives good color images with noticibly good brightness and contrast. We did notice slightly less than expected viewing angles as some discoloration was noticed when viewing the screen from extreme angles, but nothing too horrible.

There's a decent amount of connectivity options on the HP Pavilion dm1z, including three USB 2.0 ports, VGA out, HDMI out, an SD/MMC memory card reader and a single headphone/microphone combo port. There is also a gigabit Ethernet port behind a small door on the right side that's a rather strange design and as a result, it's rather flimsy.

Specifications of the HP Pavilion dm1z definitely make this model stand out among other similar computers in the 11-inch range. Our model had the all-new AMD dual-core E-350 CPU (1.6GHz), which AMD calls a Fusion and includes both the CPU and discrete graphics system all on the same die. The graphics included is an AMD Radeon HD 6310M. Besides that, you also get 3GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB 7200RPM hard drive and 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. Although no optical drive is built-in, HP does allow you to choose from two external drives, including one Blu-ray and DVD+/-RW combo drive. HP includes Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) with this notebook.

We should also mention that at a later date, HP will be including an option to have 3G cellular connectivity with this notebook through both AT&T and Verizon. However at the time of this review, this option was not available.

The new AMD Fusion CPU performed quite well in testing, especially compared to Intel Atom-based netbooks and notebooks. This new technology allows for a smaller price tag (this one is around $450) without sacrificing performance. The combined graphics with CPU on the same die allows for much more efficient handling of many tasks and resulted in very good performance ratings. However, don't expect to do any 3D gaming on this laptop because despite the new technology, it wasn't designed for that use.

Perhaps the biggest gain with the new technology is much better battery life with the included 6-cell battery. On average, expect to get about 7-8 hours of battery life with this notebook, which beats out many other similar models without the more efficient AMD Fusion technology.

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