HP Mini 311

With a high-resolution screen and better graphics packed into a standard-price Netbook, you'd be right to expect a little cost-cutting somewhere else. The Mini 311 is far from the flashiest-looking laptop out there, even among low-cost Netbooks. Most of the chassis is a dull, generic, gray plastic, with either a black or a white lid with a subtle swirl pattern. The white version, which we had, costs an extra $20 for no particularly good reason, and the very faint gray swirls on it actually made it look a bit dingy from a distance. On the plus side, the system itself feels sturdy enough, and there was no flex in the lid when we pulled it open and shut.

The keys on the keyboard have the same slightly scalloped shape and wide faces that we've seen on HP's other Netbooks, such as the Mini 110. It's a design we approve of, but in this particular case, the keys themselves felt a little loose and wiggly when typing. Likewise, the touch pad did not impress. Made of the same material as the rest of the wrist rest, it offered too much resistance to our fingers. There's a legitimate reason most laptop touch pads have a distinct, slick surface. We also had to go into the control panel to crank up the pointer speed--perhaps the default settings were created with an older 1,024x600 Netbook in mind. Two sliverlike mouse buttons under the touch pad also felt cheap and insubstantial.

The 11.6-inch wide-screen LED display is one of the Mini 311's highlights, with a 1,366x768 native resolution. We've seen this on a handful of other Netbooks, from the Sony Vaio W to the Asus Eee PC 1101. It's still very readable, and provides enough screen real estate that going back to a lower-resolution Netbook display feels positively claustrophobic in comparison. While the screen was glossy, we were actually more distracted by the even glossier black plastic screen bezel.