Two Weeks with the HP/Compaq Mini 311

Zealot | December 23, 2009

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I have spent the last two weeks using the HP/Compaq Mini 311, an 11.6 inch netbook featuring the Nvidia ION chip in addition to a standard Atom N270, as my secondary computer, in fact sometimes letting it take over primary duties for me. In that time I feel I have gotten a very good sense of what the Mini 311 can do…and what it can’t.

Of course there are any number of different benchmarks and serious number crunching evaluations of this machine out there. The Mini 311 is the first readily available netbook running an ION chip and is arguably the flagship of the HP/Compaq Mini line, so the people who like to break things into numbers have done so many times over. I, however, don’t tend to appreciate or, I admit, fully understand benchmarks. Call me old fashioned, or pagan, or just insane, but I learn more from holding and playing with a device then I ever do from reading even the most exhaustive benchmarks.

Therefore in this review I am going to discuss my impressions, feelings and personal judgments about the Mini 311. Sure other reviews may be more statistically relevant or more qualitatively absolute…but I am interested in how a device is in normal use, not how it is in benchmark testing. Based on that the reasoning I can say I love my Mini 311…but as with all such products it’s a bit of a mixed bag, some trade offs need to be made, so your mileage may vary.

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