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£399
The redesigned HP Mini by Chinese fashion designer Vivienne Tam is something of an oddity. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s nothing more than an average HP Mini 210 with butterflies plastered all over it, but in fact the Vivienne Tam Edition is a different beast altogether. The specifications differ from those of the normal HP Mini - it has an extra 80GB of storage space.
This netbook reeks of style, despite being emblazoned with fauna. The gold finish is perfectly offset with the black chiclet keys. The touchpad is quite clever compared to its rivals - it took us a little while to get used to the integrated buttons, but the pad is larger than the others on test. To turn off the pad all you need to do is double-tap the top left-hand corner, a nifty little feature that could prove useful in a live situation.
In the rundown test the Vivienne Tam performed pretty averagely, only beating the other Atom N470-loaded netbooks by a couple of extra plug-ins. Even with 2GB of RAM the Atom processor still struggles, which is a shame.
The Vivienne Tam is too expensive to really win out against its 10.1-inch rivals overall, but it is quite the object of desire, even if it does resemble a clutch bag. We wonder if we can get matching shoes…
Fashionistas on both sides of the gender divide may find the styling and great design of this netbook too much to resist, but others will balk at the price
