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HP Pavilion dm3-1020ea 13.3in Slim Elegant ENotebook

February 16, 2010 | Hewlett-Packard, Notebook | 1 Comment

Ultra-portable and affordable laptops are in vogue at the moment. Intel and Acer has started the ball rolling last year with the Acer Aspire Timeline systems, including the Aspire movement 1810TZ (winner of our Award for Best Portable Laptop last year), but HP and AMD has also teamed up to produce the promising (yet ultimately wrong) HP Pavilion dv2.

HP Pavilion dm3-1020ea 13

Now the two have joined forces to produce the new HP Pavilion DM3-1020E us today. And even if it is available with an Intel power, and the dm3 is proof positive that AMD might finally have a platform that can compete with Intel. While dm3 is actually larger than the DV2, it is based on a screen 13.3IN vs 12.1in of dv2, the common line is clear to see. The dm3 attractive and has the same chassis and slim elegant lines which we immediately drew dv2 is just a little taller and 1.9 kg heavier.

It’s prettier, too. Gone are the horrible dependence on shiny black plastic, is a chic brushed aluminum adorns both the lid and the body of the machine. It combines with the shiny black bezel again and faux chrome trim with great efficiency, making this a machine that looks and feels much more expensive than the £ 540 it’ll come back. It’s a class act.

This feat of design is paired with a decent spec probe. Directing proceedings is a dual-core AMD Athlon X2 Neo L335 clocked at 1.6GHz decent housing. It is supported by an abundance of 4 GB of RAM, ATI integrated graphics are capable Mobility Radeon HD3200 and a Zippy 7200 rpm, 320 GB hard drive – all good signs that will be performing dm3. And although the chassis is too thin to accommodate an integrated optical drive, HP is kind enough to provide an external 8x DVD Re-writer drive in the box. It has LightScribe support so you can burn disc labels using the drive.

Connectivity General, on the other hand, is quite good. It may lack niceties like eSATA or USB powered watch, but has dm3 HDMI and VGA video and a total of four USB ports – a good number for a portable machine like this. They are joined by a memory card reader, audio jacks for headphones and a microphone, and the Ethernet port. All these ports are well integrated, without any projections or looking unsightly. Somewhat unusual sliding power switch is on the right side, accompanied by a radio button wireless switch. Additional shortcut buttons of note include one above the touchpad to disable it, while the Caps Lock, mute and lock all the buttons have small scrolling LED indicators beside them all attentive touch. [via trustedreviews]