Fans of ultraportable laptops have had a lot of products to be excited about in recent months, with two excellent models in particular standing out -- the Toshiba Portege R500 and the Sony VAIO TZ150. Those are flashy consumer systems, designed to be thin, light, and eye-catching, but with high-end prices to match. HP offers a more business-oriented answer to these systems in the HP Compaq 2510p, which boasts similar stats but a more button-down design along with some corporate extras.

Our review unit cost AU$3,299, about as much as the Portege R500 or the VAIO TZ150. Business features on the HP Compaq 2510p not found on the Toshiba or Sony units include hard drive encryption and Intel's Active Management Technology (or AMT), which allows for remote IT management even when the laptop is powered off. We found using the solidly built 2510p a genuinely enjoyable experience and you really can't put a price on security

Compared to the impossibly slim body of the Sony VAIO TZ150, which measures less than an inch thick, the HP Compaq 2510p looks almost boxy. In truth, the HP's 1.2-inch thick frame is still very easy to carry around, although at 1.3 kilograms, it's markedly heavier than other recent ultraportables that come in under the 1.5 kilogram mark, such as the VAIO TX150 and Toshiba's R500. On the plus side, it feels much sturdier than either the R500 or TZ150, and the HP's keyboard and lid are both extremely inflexible, good points for frequent travellers to keep in mind.

Besides a solid keyboard, the touch pad on the HP Compaq 2510p is also noteworthy. While a bit on the small side, like most ultraportables, the touch pad has a finger-wide discrete scroll zone marked off. This highly responsive bar is much easier to use than the invisible scroll zone found on most laptops, where we just end up running our finger along the right edge of the touch pad trying to find it (or else randomly accidentally scrolling when we just want to click on something).

You won't find a Webcam or media control buttons on the 2510p, but you do get a fingerprint reader, plus more of the touch-sensitive buttons we like so much. Besides a volume scroll bar, tiny buttons along the top of the keyboard tray can launch a display utility for routing your signal to external display (useful when showing off PowerPoint presentations), control the Wi-Fi antenna, and bring up a window with all the built-in security programs in one place.

These programs include HP's ProtectTools, which can encrypt a hard drive so that data on the drive can't be read unless an authorised user is logged in. That way, even if the laptop is stolen and the drive removed, sensitive information remains safe.

Despite the LED backlit display, dubbed Illumi-Lite by HP, the screen is not nearly as thin as those in the Sony and Toshiba ultraportables. Its native resolution of 1,280x800 is standard for a 12-inch wide-screen display, and you should have no problem reading text and seeing icons. As do most business laptops, it has a matte screen finish, as opposed to the glossy and bright but glare-prone screens found on many consumer systems.

The ports and connections on the HP Compaq 2510p are in line with what we'd expect from an ultraportable, and it includes support for 802.11n Wi-Fi technology, aka Draft N.

Compared to other recent ultraportables, nearly all of which use CPUs from the same Intel ultralow-voltage family, the HP Compaq 2510p performed on par, with the exception of the Sony VAIO TZ150, whose collection of resource-hogging bloatware led to generally lagging scores.

While the company sells the HP Compaq 2510p with a nine-cell battery, our review unit arrived with two batteries, a three-cell and a six-cell unit, which it offers on other 2510p configurations but not on the model we reviewed. We tested both batteries. Like the nine-cell battery, the six-cell battery extends beyond the end of the system, but ran for an impressive three hours, 24 minutes on our demanding DVD battery drain test. You can expect even longer life under more typical usage scenarios. We attribute the long battery life chiefly to the Compaq 2510p using an ultralow-voltage Intel CPU. Competing ultraportables from Sony and Toshiba with similar or identical ultralow-voltage Intel processors ran longer, but we believe most users will be content with the 2510p's battery life, particularly since you can safely assume the standard nine-cell battery will run even longer. The three-cell battery that's available on other 2510p models sits flush with the back of the system and ran for one hour, 38 minutes, or roughly half the time the six-cell battery lasted.

Multimedia multitasking test
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

In seconds

Toshiba Portege R500-S5002

1,748 

HP Compaq 2510p

1,748 

Sony VAIO TZ150N/B

2,142 

Adobe Photoshop CS3 image-processing test
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

In seconds

HP Compaq 2510p

492 

Toshiba Portege R500-S5002

547 

Sony VAIO TZ150N/B

1,208 

Apple iTunes encoding test
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

In seconds

Toshiba Portege R500-S5002

347 

HP Compaq 2510p

350 

Sony VAIO TZ150N/B

415 

DVD battery drain test
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

In minutes

Sony VAIO TZ150N/B

247 

Toshiba Portege R500-S5002

228 

HP Compaq 2510p

204 

HP Compaq 2510p
Windows Vista Business; 1.2GHz Intel Core Duo Ultra Low Voltage U7600; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 128MB Mobile Intel 965GM Express; 80GB Toshiba 4,200rpm

Sony VAIO TZ150N/B
Windows Vista Business; 1.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Ultra Low Voltage U7500; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 64MB Mobile Intel 945GM Express; 100GB Toshiba 4,200rpm

Toshiba Portege R500-S5002
Windows Vista Business; 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Ultra Low Voltage U7600; 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 128MB Mobile Intel 945GM Express; 120GB Toshiba 5,400rpm