Hands-On: HP's Athlon Neo-based DV 2 "Ultra-Thin" Notebook

We came, we saw, we set up a meeting via twitter (true story!) and we met with AMD's Ian McNaughton and Steve Howard at CES to check out the new "ultra thin" HP DV2, featuring AMD's new 64-bit Athlon Neo mobile processor, which we've heard so much about . Initial impressions: it's surprisingly cool! Boasting the 1.6GHz Athlon Neo processor, 4GB of RAM, a 13" screen, and the comfortable keyboard that HP's getting increasingly good at (see the HP Mini 1001xx review in our February issue), the DV2 stakes out a spot somewhere just north of the netbook range. The DV2 carries a netbook-worthy price tag ($599), but comes with a whole host of things that netbooks don't: an HDMI port, slimline external Blu-ray drive, and optional discrete Radeon 3000 Mobility-series graphics. AMD says it'll get about 4 hours of battery life, thanks to a CPU and chipset that only draw 25W of power total.  AMD thinks the "ultra thin" notebook genre they're trying to create passes the "mom ... (link)