HP's entry into the sub-Mini-Notebook arena comes in the form of the HP 2133, a sleek-looking, brushed aluminum finished, lightweight but well built beauty. You can see the attention to detail in the engineering when you first open it up. From the sturdy hinge to the scratch resistant display and connectivity options you'll find just about everything you would expect in an ultra-mobile laptop.

For this test we were provided with an HP 2133 equipped with a 1.2 GHz VIA processor, 1 GB of memory, a 120 GB 5400 rpm SATA disk drive and an 8.9 inch screen. The standard 3-cell battery is supposed to give you up to 145 minutes (2 hours 15 minutes) of run time depending on usage. They do offer a 6-cell battery that increases your run time up to 5 hours, but we weren't provided with one.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) SP1 was the installed operating system as delivered on our test unit. Novell has recently released SP2 for SLED, and we went through the update process to give it a spin as well. HP markets this unit to the educational market which would seem to point toward college students. The unit is great for surfing the web, checking e-mail or instant messaging although the battery life with the standard 3-cell battery will be a drawback.

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