Hewlett-Packard OmniBook 6000 F2087W
Price: AU$8,269.
Company: Hewlett-Packard Australia
Ph: 03 9272 2895; Fax: 03 9898 7831
www.hp.com.au
The HP Omnibook was arguably the most attractive notebook in our roundup. It was also the thinnest and lightest notebook we tested. It was the only notebook that weighed less than 3kg without its power pack. The case is finished in a nice grey-silver, and the buttons on the keyboard were all black. The keyboard feedback was excellent. We found this keyboard to be one of the nicest and fastest keyboards to type on. The palmrest area was also large and comfortable.
There are two speakers located just above the keyboard as well as a blue sleep button. The HP notebook has a trackball located in the centre of the keyboard and a glidepad with five buttons. There are two buttons that sit below the glide pad and three buttons above. The buttons above the glidepad are there to be used in conjunction with the trackball. The distance between the trackball and the two buttons that are located below the glidepad is quite far and for that reason there are extra buttons on top of the glidepad.
The HP comes with a Pentium III 700 processor, 128MB of RAM and a 12GB IBM hard drive. The HP performed quite well in Winstone. As we had expected, it performed a little better than the Acer (600MHz) notebook and a little slower than all the 750+ MHz notebooks. The HP, however, did not break the three-hour mark in Battery Mark, and this was a little disappointing.
All the standard ports are on the back of the notebook. You will also find a 240-pin port for a docking station on the back. On the right of the notebook is a volume up/down control button and mute button. The audio jacks can also be found next to the volume control button. The modem and network jacks are on the right-hand side as well as the two Type II or one Type III PCMCIA slots.
The HP DVD drive pulls out and can be replaced with a 1.44in floppy drive. (The floppy drive can also be plugged into the parallel port.) The external floppy drive will also take up a little more room on your desk and there's also the chance of misplacing or losing external components when you're carting your notebook around everywhere. You can upgrade the RAM by removing a cover from the base of the notebook. There were two SO-DIMM sockets under the notebook and you could have up to 512MB of RAM in the HP by installing two 256MB RAM modules. The hard drive also pulls out easily. Removing one screw enables the IBM hard drive to be pulled out from the left-hand side of the notebook. There's also a handy clear plastic pocket on the base of the notebook that can hold your business card.
The screen panel is quite rigid but we noticed some rippling on the display when we applied pressure to the rear of the screen. The display was sharp and bright and we found it to be a little better than most of the other 14.1in displays. Priced at $8,269, the HP is a little pricier than most of the other notebooks, but if you take the HP for a test drive you will see that its one of the better built notebooks that are out there.
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