HP Mini 1000 - MIE

We had the pleasent opportunity of purchasing an HP Mini 1000 this week. It was purchased from Best Buy for $299.99 (this online offer is still showing it for $349.99.) The screen is a 10 inch glossy, and it packs nice power with a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 1 GB of Ram and 16 GB SSD.

This is a very impressive little machine.  The keyboard is huge (click the above link to read CNET’s review) and although some complain about the overly glossy screen, we have been very happy.

We didn’t want to spend all of our time writing about the hardware however, the experts have spent plenty of time in that arena.  The discussion of the day concerns HP’s foray into the Desktop Operating System: MIE.

The OS is Ubuntu based and has raised a few eyebrows in that it isn’t pure open source (There is an annoying do not attempt reverse engineering this software warning at the initial install.) We are also not going to delve into that arena as it would turn into a major flame war.

We do want to talk about the design and usability: In short HP did a real bang up job!

The glade interface does a lot with 10 inches of real estate. They prominently display the majors: Email, Browser, Music, and Photos while making the Settings and Files area easy to find. The OS happily suspends when the lid is closed, and it finds the nearest WIFI networks without annoying questions. We were also impressed with the speed it comes out of suspend when the lid is opened.

Frankly it just works.

There was a lot of work put into making the Dashboard intuitive for the common user. I applaud the HP team on a job well done.

We heartily applaud the thousands of hours put into the Ubuntu Distro, Gnome, Glade, and thousands of additional packages. I also want to thank the open sources contributors for thousands of programming hours which essentially built the bits that became HP’s Ubuntu Distro MIE.

We are excited about the possibilities of this new OS. HP seems to have plenty of support behind this endeavor and looks like they’re really going to push its adoption. I hope so! Bravo to bringing Linux to the Netbook community with such an impressive showing!