Hardware Geeks

Winner of Best of Show at the 2009 CES both AMD and HP are proud of the HP Pavilion dv2 and they have plenty of reasons to be proud.

The dv2 in my opinion has the best design of any notebook available and for a person who wants the portability and power of an ultraportable but the affordability of a netbook will find that the dv2 meets them half way.

When I first saw the dv2 during an HP Press tour back in November 2008 I thought it was an amazing machine and with the price they wanted to sell it at I thought it would kill the netbook market, because the price point was so close to some of the higher end netbooks.

I had a feeling that HP wouldn’t be able to sell the dv2 at the price they quoted me back in November I expected the dv2 to have a starting price of $1200 maybe more, so when the Machine was finally made available and I saw it only had a $749 starting price $50 dollars less than what HP told me in November I was blown away. They actually were able to get it with such a low starting price and that mainly has to do with the fact they are using an AMD CPU and ATI GPU. That is probably why during CES and even now AMD seems more excited about the dv2 than HP does.

But let’s talk about the dv2. It is a beautiful machine that has a black glossy finish with an aluminum trim similar to that of the hdx series. It has a nice paint job inside and out, next to the touch pad it has a pretty cool design and it just looks like a piece of art.

When you open up the dv2 for the first time, you are greeted by a beautiful 12.1 inch High-Definition LED backlit Widescreen Display which delivers an amazing picture when you play blu-ray movies on it. The HP Pavilion dv2 is available with an optional blu-ray. Please not that the dv2 does not have a built in drive but it does come with an option external drive which is available in Blu-Ray.

The keyboard is the same size of the hp mini 1000 keyboard which is 92% of the size of a full keyboard, but unlike the mini 1000 the keys feel smoother and it has a more elegant look. The touchpad has a mirror finish that looks amazing surrounded by black. I know some of you are thinking that a touchpad with a mirror finish will be full of finger prints and smudges, well not so much not sure what HP did but not one smudge or fingerprint is on my touchpad.

When people see this notebook they won’t realize how powerful it is, and honestly I didn’t expect it to be as powerful as it is but AMD has created a tiny monster with their Athlon Neo processor. The power of it surprised me. It has fast boot up and it handles CPU intensive programs with ease. I never expected a notebook of this size powered by an AMD CPU to be able to handle large excel files that at times can cripple my desktop.

The AMD Athlon Neo processor is a freaking powerful chip.

If you like to game on your notebook the dv2 can be gamed on, now don’t expect to play Dead or Alive on the dv2 with the settings maxed out. I was however able to play Dead or Alive with low and Medium settings and it handled it perfectly after I tweaked the settings to something it could handle. Once I figured out what settings it could handle it played games flawlessly and none of them lagged. pressive.

The ATI Radoen 3000 series GPU in the dv2 not only can handle game play but can handle those Blu-Ray movies you play on it.

Since I have the external Blu-Ray drive with my dv2 I played a lot of movies on it especially on flights when I didn’t forget the charger and the Picture Quality is better than what I would have expected from a system like this.But whats good picture if you don’t have great sound? The sound quality on the dv2 is just as good. I do not know exactly what HP has done to their speakers but over the past year it seems that with each new system they come out with the sound quality on their systems gets better and better.

The system is also fully loaded with features, 3 USB ports, an HDMI port, Bluetooth, 5 in 1 Memory card reader and wireless N the dv2 has it all.

Something else that impressed me is how long I can use the dv2 before the battery dies. I was able to get 3 hours worth of nonstop work done on the dv2, 2 and a half hours if I played a movie or gamed. But if I only used the dv2 every now and then to check my emails throughout the day or write something up quickly in word, I am able to get a 5 day battery life.

I recently went on a trip to Los Angeles and I brought the dv2 with me, forgot the charger here in NY and I used the notebook 4 to 5 times a day for 10 to 20 minutes so that I could check email and write something up and when I got to NY there was still a quarter charge left in the battery. Speaking of battery power the system is Energy Star Qualified.

The DV2 is great and so far I can honestly say this has been the best product we have reviewed so far in 2009 and hell probably end up being the best product of all 2009.

Overall the dv2 is a kick ass system and because of that we award it our 5 Star Kick Ass Award. The system is available now directly from HP with a Starting price of $749.

Post Tags: review  hp  pavilion  ultraportable  dv2 

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