14 DAY TRIAL // One of the main attractions at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada was HP's new Pavilion dv2 laptop, an ultraportable computer system designed to take advantage of the recently released AMD Yukon platform. The company's Athlon Neo-powered computer system succeeded in catching the attention of those attending the show and even won the award for the Best Notebook at CES 2009, which was given by Laptop Magazine, one of the show sponsors.
“The level of innovation we've seen at this year's CES has been impressive,” said LAPTOP Editor in Chief Mark Spoonauer. “From an entirely new smart phone platform that ties into the cloud to a notebook you can slip into a jacket pocket, there is a lot of evidence at this year's show that mobile and wireless technology will continue to see robust growth throughout the year.”
HP's ultraportable Pavilion dv2 has been designed on AMD's new Yukon platform, enabling users to take advantage of the new single-core Athlon Neo processors. The new mobile CPUs are specifically designed for ultraportable computer systems, offering an alternative to small-form factor portable PCs, such as netbooks, but without compromising on performance. The Athlon Neo processors aren't meant to compete with Intel's successful Atom CPUs, as the latter have been designed to provide the very basics in computing performance.
The HP Pavilion dv2 boasts an AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor, running at 1.6GHz, and supports up to 4GB of DDR2 memory. It comes featured with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD3410 graphics solution and can pack up to 500GB of storage space on a 5400rpm SATA hard drive.
The laptop is less than an inch thick and weighs just 3.8 pounds, which is pretty close to the physical specifications of most netbooks currently available on the market. In addition, despite better overall specifications, the laptop comes with a starting price tag of just $599.