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Home / Laptops / Thin-and-light laptops / CES 2009
Best ultraportable notebooks at CES 2009By Philip Berne, 17 January 2009
Tired of having a beast of a notebook in your backpack? We saw some new ultraportable notebooks by HP and Sony at CES that might be of interest.

HP Pavilion dv2 is 1-inch thick, AMD Athlon Neo notebook

The smaller of HP's newest laptops to use AMD's chipsets, the HP Pavilion dv2 is a 1-inch thick, glossy multimedia laptop with some impressive potential. Don't let the thin frame and the 12.1-inch display fool you, this is a serious laptop in a small shell. The dv2 can handle hard disk drives up to 500GB, and features WWAN connectivity built-in. In fact, because the HP Pavilion dv2 uses Qualcomm's new Gobi wireless chipset, you can be flexible with the network you choose for wireless service. You can even buy an external Blu-ray drive to go with your Pavilion dv2, though we suspect that option will add a hefty premium to the device's $699 starting price point. The HP Pavilion dv2 will be available starting in April, but HP is taking pre-orders now.

Sony Vaio P - Don't you dare call it a netbook

Sony has entered the small notebook category in a big way with the Sony Vaio P compact computer. The company doesn't want the device to bear the netbook badge, and with a suggested retail price of $900 or more, we'd have to agree. Besides, most netbooks don't come with WWAN capabilities for wireless 3G networking, and certainly none of the netbooks we've seen sport a screen as packed with pixels as the Sony Vaio P-series 1600 by 768 pixel display. It's a tight fit, but even Windows Vista looks shiny and slick on the ultra-wide, high-res display. With GPS, Wi-Fi and 2GB of RAM, this little beast is a real powerhouse device. We got our hands on one at CES 2009, and we were definitely impressed by the compact size. The display font seemed a bit tiny for us on the Sony Vaio P's tightly packed screen, but that's adjustable, of course. Finally, we definitely miss the trackpad, and wouldn't mind seeing a slightly deeper version of the Sony Vaio P with a new input option.

The HP Pavilion dv3 uses AMD's Turion processor, gets by mostly on style

There's no doubt HP is pushing their patterns and imprints on their laptop chassis these days. The 13.3-inch HP Pavilion dv3 seems to get by mostly on its style, as it lacks some of the best features of the smaller Pavilion dv2 machines. For one thing, it tops out at a still-respectable 400GB hard disk drive. For another, it lacks the great Qualcomm Gobi wireless option. Instead, the HP Pavilion dv3 gets the more powerful AMD Turion X2 chip with dual cores running up to 2.1GHz. With the AMD chip, of course, comes the ATI graphics, here an ATI Radeon 3200 card. All these specs are fine, but this is a great looking laptop, and its definitely getting by on its charm more than its power. Still, it comes in at a reasonable price. The HP Pavilion dv3 is available today starting at $799.
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