HP to offer Mini 1000 with Linux

The good news: HP will sell all three international editions of its 10.2 inch Mini 1000 netbook  in Australia. The not-so-good news: you’ll have to pay a bit of a premium for the privilege.

During last night’s launch of HP’s summer 2008-2009 line-up the company revealed that it would offer the XP, Linux and even Vivienne Tam designer editions of the Mini 1000 on the local market.

The Mini 1000 is set to impress, but watch out for the sticker shock

First to arrive will be the top-end Windows XP model with a 10.2 inch screen, 1GB of RAM and 60GB hard drive, touching down in mid-November for a rather hefty $899 compared to the US$499 ticket for the same system. That price will put HP at a substantial disadvantage to other 10.2 inch netbooks.

Asus’ Eee PC 1000H has an identical same core system spec (a 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor and 1GB of RAM) but an 80GB hard drive and 802.11n Wi-Fi for a $699 rrp, which is already discounted down to $649. Lenovo’s $699 IdeaPad S10 shares the same system spec but serves up a 160GB drive and an ExpressCard slot. Both systems also sport hard drives which spin at a faster 5400rpm compared to the Mini 1000’s 4200rpm platter.

We have no doubt that the Mini 1000 has by far the better keyboard and quite likely a superior construction, but HP could find it hard to convince buyers that those traits are worth $200 extra.

In mid-January we’ll see the luxed-up Vivienne Tam edition, which is identical to the XP system under its vibrant red covers. HP wasn’t able to reveal the price but a spokesman agreed that by applying the same US-to-AU formula as for the XP model we’d be ‘in the ballpark’. Given the Vivienne Tam edition costs US$699 off the rack, our maths indicates $1,249 is a reasonable guesstimate (if an entirely unreasonable price tag).

At the end of January the attention moves from fashionista to penguinista with the release of the Ubuntu-powered Mini 1000 and its unique Mobile Internet Experience (MIE) shell. This will be offered with a choice of hard drive or solid state drive. While we don’t know the exact spec of the base Linux system it sells stateside for US$379, which our netbook maths translates into AU$679.

All of these models share the same 10.2 inch screen size. Ben Baumgarten, market development manager for Hewlett-Packard’s consumer notebook range, told APC that bringing in the 8.9 inch version of the Mini 1000 was “in discussion”.

Baumgarten also confirmed that HP would refresh the current 2133 Mini-Note, which would retain its 8.9 inch form factor and continue to be targeted at business users in contrast to the Mini 1000’s consumer focus. The update is likely to include shifting from the original VIA C7-M processor to Intel’s Atom platform.

We briefly got our mitts on the Mini 1000 during last night’s launch and HP’s second-gen netbook is everything we expected it to be. The chassis feels at the same time light yet reassuringly solid an well-crafted and the keyboard is every bit as good as that of the 2133, if not even slightly better.

We’ll bring you a more detailed hands-on report as soon as HP can lob a Mini 1000 into our lap.