There’s not much to say about netbooks these days, they seem to come in that many shapes and sizes and all you can decide if you want one, or couldn’t care less for a mini laptop. Fortunately there are some manufacturers that say no to the average boring design.

When you buy a netbook first thing you need to do is to check the functions and features you’d like to see in your computer. If you want a webcam, choose a configuration with webcamera option, if you need a long lasting battery, buy a computer that has a good claimed battery life. When the list says that it runs using Intel Atom N450, you can be sure that the end result will be overwhelming, if you can handle up to almost 10 hours of battery life, you’ll have no problem riding the latest 10″ HP Atom Notebook, the HP Mini 210-1055NR.

At the first glance one could say that this is an ordinary setup and they’ve seen a dozen like this before. For the underlying hardware part they’re absolutely right. Now that N450 is on the market there won’t be too much variety on the market, mainly because it has everything integrated. If some laptop maker would like to use a different graphics controller, they had to use an older Atom N270 or Atom 330 too, not to mention some ancient north bridge memory/peripheral controller solutions. Those parts are not made using 45nm technology, therefore will not be as efficient as an N450 would have been.

The end user doesn’t sniff at the processor, and they rarely blink when they see the amount of RAM, but they spill everything they’ve got if the computer is put together hastily. The customer likes to be respected and low quality build pisses them off. HP knows this well and the mini 210 they’ve made sure everyone walks away satisfied. 10 hours of battery life thanks to the advanced N450 core (no fancy solutions here, sorry, they had to use it!), and the build quality is as good as it gets.

I always strongly suggest people to try the keyboard before they buy a netbook. The space is very little and they will have trouble typing, which can seriously hinder chatting. Don’t make the mistake and buy a netbook without being entirely sure that the keyboard will be as comfortable as it can be, everything else is secondary, well apart from the battery life but that’s at its place in this HP netbook.

1GB RAM, noone has ever gone wrong with this much, 1.66GHz processor (Don’t expect flashing lights and trombones, it’s going to be excruciatingly slow if you try to run a recent game) and a 160 GB HDD. Black minus mark here on the side note, 160GB used to be ‘good enough’ two years ago and there are much better netbook HDDs out there today. Come on HP, you know better than this. I’d also add that the netbook I’m using right now comes with a similar storage drive, and I’ve yet to come up with a way to run out of space.

What makes this netbook truly exceptional?

Its price is what I’d call a good shot. Last time I checked it could be had for $310 brand new at Amazon, it may be different now. For that money you get a netbook that will perfectly run your browser (yes, I hear you, it will run Chrome and Opera too, even with 20 tabs), Instant messaging client, and a few older games you get top notch build quality, the keyboard is unmatched (Asus uses the same style in its seashell line, those are good, too)

I suggest taking a look at a brilliant tower defense implementation by Game in a Bottle, it’s called Gemcraft Chapter 0. It runs perfectly and you’ll get hooked. There, I warned you!