14 DAY TRIAL // With all the new CPUs that have come out over the past couple of months, it can be said that PC suppliers have more than enough chips and bits to experiment with when putting together their new generations of computers. One of the more noteworthy recent events was AMD's entrance on the laptop market. The Nile platform, for one, is composed of chips aimed at ultra-thin machines and appears to have gained the attention of even the largest worldwide PC supplier.
HP adopted the Nile platform when it created the Pavilion dm1a ultra-thin laptop. No doubt the company wishes to expand its offer to appeal to a wider variety of consumers, as well as to enable an alternative to Intel's chips, which have practically owned this market for quite a long time. The processor used in this instance belongs to the Athlon II line and is accompanied by a, more or less, unusual array of components, obviously optimized for power efficiency.
The 11.6-inch PC has a screen resolution of 1366 x 768 and the ATI mobility Radeon HD 4225 graphics. The amount of storage is not the highest in history, 128GB, but it is provided by an SSD which has a higher reliability and much lower power draw than any HDD. Of course, a 250GB HDD is available as an option in case more storage is preferred. The CPU itself is the Athlon II Neo K125 (1.7GHz) and is backed up by up to 5GB of RAM. As for connectivity and I/O, HP threw in a 5-in-1 card reader, Bluetooth 2.1, 10/100 LAN, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, an HDMI 1.3 output and a 6-cell battery.
The HP Pavilion dm1a comes pre-loaded with the Microsoft Windows 7 home premium 64bit operating system and promises to last for up to 6.5 hours on a single battery charge. It is already selling in Japan, for roughly $874.