Notebook at Netbook Price: HP Pavilion dm1

The netbook is all but dead. Instead, we now have the ultraportable notebook. HP’s new Pavilion dm1 takes some cues from the latest MacBook Air, squeezing almost-notebook performance into an almost-netbook sized body.

The 3.2-pound dm1 has one of AMD’s brand new Fusion APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), a system-on-a-chip which combines multicore CPU, video-”card” and dedicated hardware hi-def video decoding into a single chip of silicon. This lets the 1.6GHz machine play movies without braking a sweat, something that most Intel Atom-powered netbooks have difficulty doing. But like the Atom, the Fusion processor consumes very little power. In fact, HP claims a battery life of 9.5 hours with a hard drive, and 10.75 hours with the optional solid-state hard drive.

The screen measures 11.6 inches and packs in 1366 x 768 pixels, and the body holds three USB ports, VGA, a card-reader, HDMI-out and Altec Lansing speakers with Dolby Advanced Audio. Finally, the dm1 has “CoolSense”, which is what HP calls its adaptive cooling tech. This detects when the notebook is mobile using accelerometers, and adjusts the interior air-flow to keep the base of the machine cool and lap-friendly.

The dm1 does inherit one thing from netbooks: looks. The chunky, plastic wedge shape is more MSI Wind than MacBook Air. The dm1 will begin at $450