November 10th, 2009Details of HP Compaq 2510p
That thriving noise you just heard is Compaq/HP firing a shot across the bow of the USS ThinkPad. With its new 2510p, the corporation is showing it can compete—and beat—Lenovo and others at the ultra-portable business notebook game. This is a notebook brimming with all the latest and greatest portable technology, and is one of the best ultra-portables available.
Features and Design
The 2510p is a highly-anticipated ultra-portable notebook from HP Compaq (seriously, can’t they just pick one name and stick with it?) that is aimed squarely at business users who demand portability over all-out performance. It’s been completely redesigned and packs all the latest in portable technology.
An ultra-portable notebook lives, and dies, by two metrics alone: battery life and weight. On the battery side of things, HP has packed an Ultra Low Voltage Core 2 Duo Processor, which should do its part to boost battery life since it merely sips CPU juice rather than guzzle it like its standard-voltage counterparts. The only downside is the unit we tested came with a 1.2GHz U7600, which is a bit slower than what we’re used to in a PC. On the scale, the 2510p weighs in at a claimed 2.9lbs. Which is extremely light and a sweet nothing to road warriors everywhere. The right-side of the 2510p sports an Express Card slot, an SD slot, mini FireWire, headphone/mic, one USB port, VGA out and a port for use with a docking station. The back of the unit features just an Ethernet port, a Kensington lock mount, and the battery. We received the six-cell battery, which sticks out the back a bit, but a three-cell and a nine-cell battery are also available.
Most ultra-portable notebooks ship with a 12-or13†display, and the 2510p uses a 12.1†display that has a widescreen aspect ratio, with a matte—rather than glossy—finish. The matte finish helps reduce glare that is so common to glossy displays, but it is arguably less “shiny and pretty†in our opinion. The big deal with the 2510p is it’s the first Windows-based notebook to use LEDs to taillight the display rather than a cold cathode backlight. The benefits to this approach, based on what we’ve read, is more even and consistent lighting, lack of backlight poking through on the top or bottom of the display, and less battery usage. We have to say that it does look good, while it’s by no means a mind-blower. At first glance it’s hard to really tell the difference to be honest, but after using it for awhile and doing side-by-side comparisons, it does look more even and “normal†in terms of the lighting. Overall, we like it but it did not blow us away.
The 2510p ships with the newest Intel mobile chipset, aka the Santa Rosa platform. It features Intel’s X1300 onboard video chipset, which is fine for email and web surfing, but not sufficient at all gaming as long as you stay in the realm of casual titles like Chuzzle and the like. We tried in vain to run Portal on it, but it be unplayable. This is not surprising, as ultra-portables be not meant for gaming.
Battery
The unit we received for testing includes a six-cell battery, but a three-cell and a nine-cell are also available. To put the battery to the test we charged it to 100 percent, unplugged it from AC power, and started our stopwatch. At the default brightness setting, with Wi-Fi enabled and a DVD playing we arrived at a final time of three hours and 35 minutes. Overall that’s not too shabby, and is about what we would expect from an ultra-portable notebook.
Like any business-class notebook, the 2510p comes with Vista Business edition. The literature that accompanied the notebook indicated that XP as well as Vista Home Basic would be options but we did not see any such OSes available on the HP website. Regardless, Vista Business is the OS of choice for business users and comes on pretty much every business notebook, and we think it’s a decent OS in that it includes backup functionality; something the Home versions of the OS are lacking.2
