I picked up an HP Mini 1030NR Netbook from Best Buy yesterday.  I had some Reward Zone certificates that were about to expire, so I ended up getting a great deal on it (about $65 out of pocket).

I’ll write up a more in depth review after I’ve had some time to play with it, but I’ll give a few quick observations here. First, I immediately put the Windows 7 beta on it, and it performs really well.  It’s not as fast as a full blown laptop or desktop machine, but the performance is completely acceptable for casual, every day web use.  While the keyboard is smaller than I’m used to (my “real” laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad R61), it has a very nice feel to it.  The screen is bright and beautiful, and about as small as I can see myself using at 10.2″.

It has built in 802.11g wireless, which so far shows really solid performance.  The two USB ports allow for some nice expansion options and make it easy for me to use my Sprint EVDO card for on-the-go wireless whereever I am.  Even though there’s no optical drive, I can easily plug in an external DVD drive via USB when I absolutely need it.

The HP Mini is a tad bit heavier than other netbooks I’ve seen, but it’s not uncomfortable to carry.  It has a similar case design to other HP notebooks, which is very attractive.

All in all, a great package from what I can tell so far.  I ran into a problem getting the Sierra Wireless drivers installed for my Sprint EVDO card on Windows 7, but it was an easy fix (I’ll post a full writeup on this in a separate post).  I also had to manually install the touchpad drivers, as Windows 7 saw it only as a PS/2 mouse.  The default drivers allowed the touchpad to work as a mouse with no problems, but I missed my “scroll area” on the touchpad, so I grabbed the drivers from the Synaptics website.

I’m looking forward to playing with this new netbook!