David Flynn16 September 2009, 12:20 PM
HP’s second-gen ‘thin and light’ 13.3 inch notebook puts a buck each way with your choice of ultra-low voltage processors from Intel and AMD.
Longer battery life or increased graphics grunt? It’s typically an either-or proposition for any notebook, let alone the new wave of thin-and-light laptops built around parsimonious low voltage processors.
With HP’s Pavilion dm3 it’s
still an either-or situation, but now both options are presented in the same 13.3 inch notebook.
Tick the first box and you get Intel’s Pentium SU4100 processor, which HP says is good for up to ten hours away from the AC socket using the standard six-cell Li-Ion battery.
Tick the second box and the dm3 packs AMD’s Athlon X2 Neo with an ATI Radeon HD 3200 GPU, although there’s the option to switch to Intel’s integrated GMA 4500MHD graphics when running on batteries.
Battery life drops to six hours, but this is still more than twice as much as the original Pavilion dv2, which was the first laptop to adopt AMD’s ULV Neo platform.
However, at US$549 the AMD/ATI system is also cheaper than the Intel-only version’s US$649 sticker. The dm3 goes on sale in the US on October 22nd, with HP Australia yet to confirm local pricing and availability. Hopefully we’ll see both dm3s score a slot on the dance-card.
Like its other Spring 2009 siblings, the Pavilion dm3 takes a step away from the luxe finish of HP’s gorgeous imprint designs. The new look is brushed metal-clad casework built on aluminium and magnesium alloys to emphasis the sleek physical shape of the trend towards thin notebooks.
The dm3’s skinny chassis doesn’t permit room for an optical drive, alas, but nor is there an internal cooling fan, thanks to the ULV silicon. There is however room for an inbuilt 3G HSDPA card, which we’re hoping will appear on the Aussie menu.