An ultra-portable notebook lives, and dies, by two metrics alone: battery life and weight. On the battery side of things, HP has packed an Ultra Low Voltage Core 2 Duo Processor, which should do its part to boost battery life since it merely sips CPU juice rather than guzzle it like its standard-voltage counterparts. The only downside is the unit we tested came with a 1.2GHz U7600, which is a bit slower than what we’re used to in a PC. On the scale, the 2510p weighs in at a claimed 2.9lbs. which is incredibly light and a sweet nothing to road warriors everywhere.

Most ultra-portable notebooks ship with a 12-or13” display, and the 2510p uses a 12.1” display that has a widescreen aspect ratio, with a matte—rather than glossy—finish. The matte finish helps reduce glare that is so common to glossy displays, but it is arguably less “shiny and pretty” in our opinion. The big deal with the 2510p is it’s the first Windows-based notebook to use LEDs to backlight the display rather than a cold cathode backlight. The benefits to this approach, based on what we’ve read, is more even and consistent lighting, lack of backlight poking through on the top or bottom of the display, and less battery usage. We have to say that it does look good, though it’s by no means a mind-blower. At first glance it’s hard to really tell the difference to be honest, but after using it for awhile and doing side-by-side comparisons, it does look more even and “normal” in terms of the lighting. Overall, we like it but it did not blow us away.

Onboard video

The 2510p ships with the latest Intel mobile chipset, aka the Santa Rosa platform. It features Intel’s X1300 onboard video chipset, which is fine for email and web surfing, but not sufficient at all gaming as long as you stay in the realm of casual titles like Chuzzle and the like. We tried in vain to run Portal on it, but it was unplayable. This is not surprising, as ultra-portables are not meant for gaming.

Battery life

The unit we received for testing includes a six-cell battery, but a three-cell and a nine-cell are also available. To put the battery to the test we charged it to 100 percent, unplugged it from AC power, and started our stopwatch. At the default brightness setting, with Wi-Fi enabled and a DVD playing we arrived at a final time of three hours and 35 minutes. Overall that’s not too shabby, and is about what we would expect from an ultra-portable notebook.