For a company looking to get out of the PC business, HP has certainly been busy releasing new PCS—and the latest is the HP Pavilion dm1, which the company is touting as the “ultimate ultraportable PC.” The dm1 is intended to offer a top-flight Windows 7 experience coupled with easy portability, long battery life, and lap-saving low-heat performance. The dm1’s case is also HP’s first to feature soft-touch imprint technology, that puts graphics on a rubber skin that covers the outside of the notebooks, providing a tactile experience that doesn’t show the blemishes of fingerprints and smudges like gloss notebooks.
The Pavilion dm1 weights just 3.52 pounds and is less than once inch thick—figures that will be very appealing to folks looking for lightweight portability. The dm1 will sport an 11.6-inch HD LED-backlit display and can be powered by either an AMD E-series Fusion APU or a second-generation Intel Core processor. The AMD models will feature AMD Radeon HD discrete graphics. HP says the dm1 can offer up to 11.5 hours of battery life.
HP will also be equipping the Pavilion dm1 with the “HP Premiere Experience,” providing faster boot, shutdown, sleep, and resume times than Windows 7 can offer on its own: according to HP, the dm1 shuts down and resumes 29 and and 25 percent faster, and also offers improved boot and sleep times. The notebook also features HP CoolSense technology with intelligent fan performance to keep the PC’s surface temperature comfortable, along with HP SimplePass support with a fingerprint reader and ProtectSmart technology that locks the hard drive in the event of a bump or fall. The dm1 will also feature HP QuickWeb, which enables users to get on the Web within seconds of powering up the machine, so users don’t have to wait for a full Windows boot.
The AMD version of the Pavilion dm1 will be available in charcoal with a starting price of $399.99 beginning on September 21. Intel-based versions should be available on October 30 with base prices starting at $599.99 with an external optical drive included in the bundle: the Intel versions will initially be available in charcoal, but HP says a soft-touch ash version should be available later in the fall.
