HP Mini 1103 netbook for student gets reviewed – pretty good for $299

The HP Mini 1103 netbook is primarily an educational tool with a decent price of $299 and laptopmag.com is here with the review. It’s aimed at schools and students with less money to spend and will get simple tasks done with minimal fuss. The best thing about this netbook is the battery life and if you add to that the included productivity software, you’ve got everything you need to go to school.

The design is simple and resembles the Pavilion dm1, with a glossy black lid (which will attract fingerprints) and a plastic finish surrounding the entire 10 inch netbook. The back of the netbook has a simple panel for upgrading the RAM and HDD.

The device doesn’t heat up too much, as the maximum temperature was 92 degrees and it was on the underside. The keyboard comes with buttons for media applications and the keyboard buttons have a terraced design, which offers good stability and better grip. The touch pad is rather small because of the two large mouse buttons, but the overall experience is pretty good. Sound is surprisingly strong, but lacks quality most of the time, but it’s a normal feature on a budget netbook.

In order to have a low price, HP equipped the netbook with a single core Atom N455 processor and 1 GB of RAM, which is an obsolete set up for many users. Nevertheless, the performance is similar and maybe better in comparison with other budget models, due especially to the fast 250 GB 7.200 rpm HDD.

HP Mini 1103

Video performance is as expected, with decent performance when playing clips from the HDD, but a little buggy when streamed from Youtube. The battery will hold for well over 8 hours, which is 2 hours  above the category average. On the downside, the WiFi showed problems when the netbook was positioned 50 feet from the router.

Bundled together there are a few good office tools, like Office Starter and Corel Office Suite, which should prove helpful to students.

So all in all, the HP Mini 1103 is for sure a nice device to have. Of course, there are better built and equipped devices in the 1o inch class, but if on a budget and looking for an affordable pick, this is right now one of your best picks, right next to the Asus 1001P or the Toshiba NB255.

Tags: HP Mini netbooks, Intel Atom, review

Last updated: March 27, 2012 | Published: February 1st, 2011 | Add the first comment!