8 MONTH EDIT: After owning the laptop for 8 months I've noticed some other things. First, the battery life is around 3.5hours for browsing the internet. Second, the laptop has started to heat up significantly compared to when I first got it. I think that this might be HP's bad heatsink installation, as I've had problems like this with other HP laptops. Third, the laptop cannot play Hulu or certain flash based videos due to the slower processor. It can play youtube 720p when connected to my TV, but there is a slightly noticeable drop in smoothness. Overall, I would lower my rating to 3 stars.The HP dm3-3010us I got from Amazon was, at first look, all I expected from a portable laptop. It's got the following:
PROS:
-Thin and lightweight. Feels very thin because of the tapered design (similar to macbook air)
-Great size and weight balance making it easy to carry or put on a lap.
-Nice softtouch exterior with very nice styling (I like the black color and design better than apple's macbook styling)
-COOL bottom with fan vents on the side (this has to be the only laptop that has never gotten hot on my lap (it's barely as warm as my skin temperature at even the warmest spots on the bottom)). I have no problems keeping this on my lap all the time. No fan vents on the bottom mean its OK to keep this on carpet or a blanket in bed or anything without worry about blocking the vents. Definitely a great feature that is not included in most laptops.
-Easy to use keyboard with inverse function keys (don't need to hold function to access volume/brightness/wifi/monitor keys)
-bright, clear screen
-HDMI, VGA, and eSATA ports make for this to be a very good media laptop to connect to my TV
-webcam and microphone work well
But I was misled by the some of the claims, even though I should've known better:
CONS:
-Battery life. More around 4:30-5:00 hours with mainly text based internet browsing (definitely nowhere near 7.5h). I have not tested it with youtubeHD or movies, but I assume it would even lower in those settings.
-Touchpad. Is a pain (as stated by some reviewers). So the touchpad size and surface are great. However, the multitouch is very annoying. It requires a lot of fooling around with settings, and even then the only mildly useful thing is two-finger scrolling. But that doesn't always recognize, and about 20% of the time, I have to lift my fingers and retry the scroll gesture to get it to recognize. This touchpad made me very aware of how important scroll functionality is while browsing the web. Even after much tweaking, I still prefer using the traditional scroll area on the right side (thankfully works well), rather than two finger scroll.
-Touchpad buttons. There are good and bad sides to this. The buttons are integrated into the pad surface making the total area bigger. However, I control the cursor with my index finger and use my thumb to hit the buttons. On this trackpad, the touch sensitive area continues over the buttons so it will often think I'm trying to perform some two finger gesture instead of just a click. I've basically converted to using the tap-to-click functionality now.
-HP Bloatware. This laptop is loaded with so much crap out of the box that it's almost unbelievable. It's like the good old days of AOL, except twice as bad. After first bootup, I was so disgusted that I decided to reinstall Windows from the "recovery partition," but even then it still reinstalled a lot of the crappy software. So I had to manually uninstall several programs still. The good thing is that this might keep the price of the laptop down a bit for consumers.
Other Thoughts:
-Don't expect a powerhouse of this laptop. It can barely handle 720p youtube videos without noticeable drop in FPS. However, switching to 1080p causes considerable drop in FPS to unviewable territory.
-Windows 7 runs fine with aero etc.
-General internet browsing using Firefox 4 beta is as snappy as any computer.
-The sound output is respectable in that I can watch a movie in bed comfortably. Its max volume is loud enough to be heard in most noisy environments.
Buy HP Pavilion dm3-3010us 13.3-Inch Laptop PC - Up to 7.5 Hours of Battery Life (Black) Now
Have had this machine for a week now. I wanted a very portable, but not wimpy, notebook PC to take to college classes and to use around the house when not in my home office. So far, I'm very pleased.If I had to describe it machine in one sentence, I'd call it a "netbook on steroids."
It is very thin and light, but not too tiny. I'm in my fifties and need new glasses, yet the display is very readable for me. The keyboard is taking a little getting used to, but should not be a problem. I do like the "island" style because I don't "catch" the undersides of keys with my fingertips as on other laptop keyboards. (I'm a relatively fast touch typist).
Unlike some underpowered netbooks, this pc is nice and responsive thanks to the 4 GB of RAM. I have not measured the battery life per se, but it's clearly way better than my more powerful, but not-very-portable, 17" desktop replacement. I think 5 hours or so on a single charge would be doable, if one tweaked the power settings. That's just an estimate, though.
I haven't tried any truly intense tasks with this machine yet (like editing large graphics or video files), but I can say that remote-desktopping into my more powerful machine works beautifully.
One thing that freaked me out a bit at first was the absence of "Home/End/PageUp/PageDown" keys. But pressing the FN key along with an arrow key gives you the same functionality.
So far the "gestures" on the touchpad aren't really working for me, but I always have some trouble getting that sort of thing to work for me. (Must be my "magnetic" personality...)
All in all, a lot of machine for the money. And very, very portable.We just got the HP for the light weight and screen size. It's a fast computer, bright screen, light weight and well built. We have had it for about 4 days now and I think I will order a second one....just in case. For 1/2 the money of the Macbook air with twice the ram and memory it's a great computer.
Want HP Pavilion dm3-3010us 13.3-Inch Laptop PC - Up to 7.5 Hours of Battery Life (Black) Discount?
The case seems very durable, the screen is bright and easy to read, the keyboard has a nice feel, and the whole laptop is thin and relatively light. Comes with Windows 7 and all the bells and whistles. But the mouse buttons on the touchpad are unbelievably stiff. If you have any kind of repetitive stress injury, you'll feel the extra effort to click in the tendons in your hand and wrist after only an hour or two of use.Am having to buy a separate mouse to use. I would not have bought this laptop if I had a chance to try it in the store first. Why, HP, why??
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