March 17th, 2009 | nubae
Compaq mini 700
This is a recent netbook release, which is a clone of the HP mini note 1000, but seems to be available overseas only. Compared to the Eeepc and Acer, it wins great points in terms of style. If an iphone and a macbook had a baby, this is what it would look like. With a full sized, comfortable keyboard, and nicely responsive mouse, the look and feel make it the nicest netbook I've had the pleasure of using. I've heard some people complain that the casing may not be as sturdy as the Acer and Asus, but I have not seen any issues yet. Perhaps a few years on, there might indeed be issues with the thinness at some places on the case, but I'll give up a little sturdiness for the pleasure of looking at this beauty and day of the week.
Though like other netbooks, the mouse buttons are on the sides, this seems to work allright with this model, and I'm not sure why, though maybe its because they are plenty big. The speakers are in a grill that fits along the bottom, where the keyboard and screen meet. The speakers won't win any awards, but not only do they look good, they sound is great too.
In terms of performance, it is quite similar to other Atom powered netbooks, with 1 gigabyte of ram, being more than sufficient to run Ubuntu or Windows XP. Ubuntu Intrepid ran out of the box, and hummed along nicely, with about 4 hours of battery life. The webcam worked out of the box too, which was a nice surprise as this wasn't the case with the Acer or Eee PC. This model seems to be about 100 € cheaper than the HP which will release next month here in Europe and the UK, but it seems it will just be a matter of branding, as the specs seem to be identical. Perhaps the main difference will be the size of the hard drive, which at 60 gigabytes is a little on the small side, but keeping discipline by putting video and music files on external drives seems to be a good idea anyway, so I don't see that as much of a problem. The HP mini note will probably have a 180 gigabyte drive, and 3 usb connections as opposed to 2 (one is disabled on the compaq mini.)
Going quickly back to running on ubuntu there were no problems with sound drivers, wifi drivers, or keypad and touchpad. It just all seemed to work out of the box. The screen at 10.2 inches is nicely widescreen and the perfect size for both work and play (watching movies, listening to music)
I'd definitely recommend this for anyone looking to use a netbook with Linux.
