Verizon Wireless offers up a speedy little netbook with NVIDIA's Ion graphics chipset. Is this the best portable for traveling gamers? Find out in our HP Mini 311 review.
Design – Good
The HP Mini 311 on Verizon Wireless is a smallish clamshell netbook. It looks more like a shrunken multimedia laptop than a child's toy netbook, with glossy plastic painted like sanded metal on the inside and a pleasant, swirling pattern on the black outer shell. It isn't especially small or light, but it does feel sturdy. Opening the Mini 311 reveals the best feature on HP's netbook family, the large keyboard. The full QWERTY keyboard is among the biggest you'll find on a netbook, more than 90% as large as a full size desktop keyboard, which makes for very easy typing. Unfortunately, the trackpad on the HP Mini 311 is tiny. It's a slim rectangle just below the keyboard, and we wish that HP would have used more of the empty space on the bottom of the clamshell to devote to the trackpad. Using it was difficult, and when you have serious browsing or productive work to do, with Excel, for instance, you'll want to plug in an external mouse.
The display on the HP Mini 311 is very nice. It's 11.6-inches diagonally, and it boasts a 1366 by 768 pixel resolution. That's plenty of pixels for watching high definition content at 720p. Everything looked great on the screen, from the stylish Windows 7 operating system (and those great new wallpapers) to high-def movie trailers to simple text. Packing so many pixels in such a small space can make for some tiny letters, but words were sharp enough that we didn't have to squint.
Otherwise, there are few shortcut buttons on the laptop, and we think it could benefit from a few additions. There's a wireless button to turn Wi-Fi on and off, but we'd love to see a button that controls the WWAN. If we could press a button and connect quickly to Verizon Wireless' network, that would be a great help. Volume controls and screen brightness share space with the function keys, but these buttons weren't very responsive in our tests. Often the HP Mini 311 would ignore our request to turn down the noise. We'd like to see dedicated volume controls that react quickly.
Hardware Specs and Ports – Good
The HP Mini 311 is one of the first netbooks on the market with the NVIDIA Ion chipset inside. The Ion chipset is a variation on the NVIDIA 9400M G graphics chip, which is the same graphics card you'll find in middle-performing laptops like the Macbook Air. The chip has been optimized to help with HD video playback, and NVIDIA claims the chips can support video at resolutions up to 1080p. Adobe has also recently added GPU support to their latest Flash 10 release, and since you'll spend much of your video watching time streaming Flash videos from various Web sites, this should be a boon to netbooks like the HP Mini 311. In practice, the HP Mini 311 certainly outperformed every other netbook we've seen, but it didn't quite live up to the marketing promises. We tried playing a variety of high resolution WMV files, Quicktime movie trailers and Flash video from sites like YouTube and Hulu. Files stored on the HP Mini 311's hard drive played very smoothly and looked great. Streaming files didn't quite deliver the performance we were hoping to find. The HP Mini 311 couldn't manage to play Hulu videos even in 480p, the standard resolution for DVDs, and HD content on YouTube also gave us some trouble. At first we wanted to blame a slow network connection, but whether we were using the built-in Verizon Wireless connection or our home Wi-Fi network, videos would inevitably stutter or even stop altogether, often freezing on a single frame of video while the audio portion would keep playing.
Still, we were pleased with the video performance on the HP Mini 311. Even for a netbook, the Mini 311 outperformed many full-size laptops that rely on Intel integrated graphics rather than a dedicated graphics chipset. The processor left something to be desired, though. The Intel Atom N270 chip and the NVIDIA Ion together couldn't quite keep up with the visually exciting Windows 7 interface, and often windows, especially in the Web browser, would redraw very slowly when moved or resized. Most of the time, this won't bother you, but you won't mistake the HP Mini 311 for a full-powered desktop.
The version of the HP Mini 311 that Verizon Wireless is selling comes with a slightly downgraded set of specs than you can find and customize on the HP direct Web site. On the HP site, you can upgrade the processor to an Intel Atom N280, boost the RAM to 3GB, up from 2GB on the Verizon model, double the hard drive space and even improve the speed of the Wi-Fi by adding Wireless-N capabilities. If you're going to be using the WWAN capabilities regularly, it doesn't make sense to pass up the considerable subsidy Verizon Wireless is offering with a contract agreement, but it's too bad Verizon Wireless didn't offer full customization options for this device.
The HP Mini 311 comes with a nice selection of ports, though nothing here is groundbreaking. We like seeing 3 USB 2.0 ports on the netbook. The Mini 311 also comes with an Ethernet port for faster, wired networking. To show videos or project slideshows on a larger screen, the HP Mini 311 includes a VGA output as well as a full-size HDMI port. Both of these worked without trouble connected to our portable projector and HDTV. The Mini 311 also includes a 5-in-1 expansion card slot that works with SD, xD, Memory Stick, MS Pro and MMS cards. For headphones and microphones, there's a combination audio in/out jack.
Web browsing and Internet Connectivity – Good
With a great selection of Internet connection options built-in, the HP Mini 311 is a good device for Web surfing on the go, but it could have been a little better. The Mini 311 comes with a Qualcomm Gobi chipset built in, which means you can choose your service provider if you buy directly from HP, but our unit came from Verizon Wireless and was set up for their EV-DO Rev. A network. With cellular data connections, netbooks could stand to learn a thing or two from smartphones. Every time we wanted to connect to Verizon's netwok, we had to use VZAccess Manager software. It's the same software you'll use if you buy an external USB modem or Express Card modem, and that's the problem. The software is a little buggy, and it would occasionally fail to connect or drop our connection for no apparent reason. Then, we would have to restart the software, or sometimes restart the entire system to get the modem connection to work. We'd like to see a more seamless experience, especially since the cellular radio is built into the device. We would like an always-on connection, like we get on our smartphones, or at least a single button that could sign us onto the network quickly. Having to use an extra bit of software put a speed bump on our path when we wanted to cruise without stopping, and the software just wasn't reliable enough to be a good experience. If smartphones can handle the network connection without bothering the end user, certainly a netbook should be able to pull this off.
Once we were connected, the connection seemed a bit slow for Verizon's normally impressive EV-DO Rev. A network. In our speed tests we never hit 1Mbps, and in fact the built-in connection seemed slower than our MiFi device, also running on Verizon, sharing its connection over Wi-Fi. Obviously things were much faster when we used our home Wi-Fi network instead, but we wish Verizon offered the 802.11n option that you'll find for the HP Mini 311 in HP's own online store. That would have made for a truly impressive netbook.
Our Web browsing experience on the HP Mini 311 was very good. We tried a variety of Web browsers and a wide range of sites, and everything ran smoothly, as it should on a Windows 7 Home Premium machine. Internet Explorer could occasionally have trouble resizing and redrawing windows, especially with numerous tabs open, but faster browsers like Google's Chrome browser gave us no such issues. The HP Mini 311 chewed up all our favorite sites, from text-heavy sites like Google Reader or our online e-mail accounts, to Flash and graphics heavy sites, like some Flash-rich shopping sites we enjoy or YouTube. As we mentioned, performance took a hit on the most intense streaming videos, but high definition videos like the 720p movie trailers on Apple's Quicktime site loaded very quickly and played with no trouble.
Our biggest trouble with Web browsing wasn't performance, it was design. The trackpad is a bit small and made controlling long Web pages a chore. There wasn't much room on the trackpad to manipulate the cursor on screen. Though we found tracking to be very accurate and responsive, the trackpad didn't work as well when we tried to use the designated scrolling area on the right side of the pad. Most of the time the HP Mini 311 didn't register that we wanted to scroll, and often scrolling could be jerky or less responsive than we'd like. With an external mouse plugged in, though, these problems quickly disappeared.
Productivity – Good
As a netbook, the HP Mini 311 doesn't come with the intense security options of a full-fledged business laptop, like a fingerprint scanner or facial recognition, but the capable Windows 7 Home Premium OS can handle any additions you'd like to make to the software lineup. The netbook ships with Microsoft Works for simpler production tasks, as well as a trial version of Microsoft Office. If you don't want to spring for the full Office kit, you can still use the HP Mini 311 as a handy presentation tool with the preloaded PowerPoint Viewer 2007 software.
When things go wrong, HP also includes a nice bit of software to help keep your netbook healthy. In fact, during our testing period we encountered a full system crash. Instead of having to reinstall the system, the HP backup kit was able to restore the system to an early save point and fix the damage. We were on our way in minutes, not hours, and we didn't have to reinstall any software.
Because the HP Mini 311 uses the Qualcomm Gobi chip, which supports Verizon Wireless' EV-DO technology in addition to the HSDPA networks used by AT&T and others, the netbook makes a fine companion for road warriors, even if you're traveling abroad. You can buy a SIM from Verizon Wireless or local carriers if you find yourself in a country without EV-DO, and the Mini 311 will work on the local HSDPA frequencies.
Fun – Good
More than any other netbook we've tried, the HP Mini 311 is a capable gaming machine. Though you won't see desktop-class performance from this device, the NVIDIA Ion-equipped Mini 311 was able to handle most of the games we tried with no trouble. Without an optical drive we were unable to try some of our most advanced games, like Call of Duty or Crysis, but there are solid download options available on the Web for these games and others, especially World of Warcraft, and we're seeing more games released on USB sticks, like the Sims 3. All of the simpler, Flash-based games we tried with the HP Mini 311 ran smoothly and we played with no trouble. With its 3 USB ports, the Mini 311 also had no problem handling our peripherals and accessories, like a gaming mouse and keyboard.
The HP Mini 311 also comes with a selection of trial games from HP and Wildtangent. These offer some extended demo life, but you'll eventually have to pay to get the full version of games like Scrabble, Wheel of Fortune and other casual titles. Otherwise, there isn't much fun software preloaded, besides the simple paint programs and some software to control the VGA Webcam.
Battery Life – Mediocre
Battery life on our HP Mini 311 review unit did not live up to our expectations. Though Verizon Wireless claims the netbook will last up to 6.25 hours between charges, we can't imagine the low power settings required to achieve this feat. We set screen brightness to 50% and tried casual browsing and word processing work, and the HP Mini 311 couldn't even hang on for 4 hours. Using the graphics processor on high performance mode and the WWAN connection, we managed to drain the battery in under 2 hours. You can buy an extra 6-cell battery for this device, but there are no extended battery options available from HP.
Value – Good
If you're going to be using the Verizon Wireless connection regularly, the subsidy on the HP Mini 311 makes this netbook a great value. We priced the same netbook on HP's online store and found the same computer on sale for $630. That means Verizon Wireless is offering a $430 discount with a 2-year contract agreement. If you're not going to be using the WWAN option at all, you can find the same laptop with improved specs all around, including a faster processor, more RAM, larger hard disk drive and faster networking, for about the same price as the unsubsidized model, but that's a bit expensive for device in the netbook category. The subsidized Verizon option is still quite a bargain if you don't mind paying $60 per month for a data plan.
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