The success of the Asus Eee PC isn’t in doubt and, with some businesses hoping to kit out their entire workforce with 1kg wonders, HP’s entry into this market is a promising step.

The Mininote 2133 looks very attractive and the build quality is good.

The biggest problem with ultraportable notebooks is invariably the keyboard, but HP has done an impressive job with the 2133, again strengthening its appeal to businesses.

The keyboard stretches entirely to the left and right edges and is, according to HP, 92 per cent of the size of a regular notebook’s keyboard. It’s very easy to type on and we’d even go so far as to say it can challenge much bigger notebooks for ease of use. There are mouse buttons to the left and right of the touchpad, rather than below, which saves space.

An excellent lock button sits between the touchpad and keyboard, which toggles the trackpad on and off so you don’t accidentally move the cursor when typing. Another neat touch is the Wifi on/off switch and, unlike many small notebooks, an Express Card slot is included for future upgrades.

Two speaker bars sandwich the screen, pumping out impressively loud sound for a portable device, while the 8.9in screen has a bright (153.3cd/m2) backlight and detailed 1,280x768 resolution. This is the highest resolution you’ll get on a small and cheap notebook - the rest rely on a 1,024x600 resolution, which can pose problems for poorly designed programs.

The screen’s glossy coating is thick, making it very prone to reflections. Corporate laptops tend not to use reflective coatings, as they are less suitable for bright working environments. On the other hand, glossy coatings do improve perceived contrast, which is preferable for movie watching, but firing up video on the 2133 reveals its dark side. Full-screen video, be it a standard-definition MPEG-4 clip or even Youtube, becomes unwatchable because it drops so many frames.

Such poor performance is quantified by a rock-bottom result of 671 in PCmark05, with the CPU result of 655 less than half that of an Eee PC 900, which achieved 1,462. A Via C7-M 1.2GHz CPU is the culprit and even 2GB of Ram and a 120GB hard drive doesn’t do enough to raise the scores.

The PC’s low-end Via Chrome9 graphics means it doesn’t meet Microsoft’s standards for running Windows Vista Business, which comes installed. In fact, it only qualifies for a Vista Basic sticker. That said, Vista performance wasn’t too bad, booting up in one minute and 10 seconds. A Linux version is also available (£350) with a smaller battery.

The Vista version has a large 55Wh battery, which pushes the weight and centre of gravity uncomfortably to the rear of the machine, but it did last three hours and 44 minutes in our reader test, an hour longer than the Eee PC 900.

At £452, this isn’t a particularly cheap sub-notebook. And at 1.45kg, excluding power adapter (1.9kg including), it’s not especially light for something with no optical drive. The HP Mininote 2133 is one of the most mixed bags we’ve seen in a long time.

Its keyboard, screen resolution, speakers and build quality are superb, but the awful performance, relatively heavy weight and glossy screen make it incredibly frustrating to use. It’s fine for word processing, but Atom-based devices from MSI, Acer and Asus are cheaper and better all-round notebooks.