HP Mini 5102: A Business Netbook

Netbooks are an interesting category of mobile device; some people love them and others loathe them. We definitely wouldn’t want to be stuck with a netbook as our primary computing device, and probably not even our primary laptop. HP actually understands this quite well with the 5102 and markets it as a companion device for business users, with some interesting features to back up that claim. This is a “mini executive” laptop that would pair up very nicely with a ProBook or EliteBook if you’re part of the HP ecosystem.

We should note that the 5102 is actually an older model and it has since been replaced by the 5103, which uses the same basic chassis and design but switches to DDR3 enabled Atom CPUs. So why are we reviewing this older laptop? For one, it’s still on sale, and prices have dropped quite a bit since its introduction making it a more interesting option. The other reason is pretty typical: HP offered to send us a unit for review, and we figured, “why not?” We know what to expect from Atom N450 in terms of performance, but having looked at the ProBook and EliteBook we were interested to see HP’s “Business Mini” in person. Most of what we have to say about the 5102 applies to the 5103 as well, except we’d expect better battery life and slightly better performance from the newer model—though the N550 CPU might cut battery life in pursuit of performance. So with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s see what the Mini 5102 has to offer.

The basic feature set for the 5102 is the same as what you’ll find with many Atom netbooks, but HP has some extra features in the way of software to make it more useful. One set of software is HP QuickSync, which keeps your Mini synced up with your desktop’s email, documents, images, etc. This makes it very easy to pick up the Mini and head out for meetings, without having to worry about manually transferring your data. HP also includes Corel Home Office, which allows users to view and edit MS Office files without the need to spend a bunch of money on a fully licensed version of MS Office. The remaining features aren’t particularly noteworthy, but let’s give a rundown of the specifications of the Mini 5102.

Besides the regular items, the interesting additions include a matte LCD panel, 7200RPM hard drive, and—shock and awe!—a Gigabit Ethernet controller. The latter is particularly useful if you plan on using the QuickSync feature with larger files, though the estimated 14+ hours to do the initial sync with my desktop (and around 30GB of data) shows that QuickSync isn’t necessarily the fastest way to do things. The wireless network controller is also a higher end option than what most netbooks get, with 802.11a/b/g/n support (11a is used in businesses on occasion, though I’ve yet to see anyone using it at home).

Depending on where you pick up your Mini, you can custom configure the system. HP’s site has the Mini 5103, which is the same only it offers newer CPUs—including the new dual-core N550—and DDR3 memory. HP offers a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder upgrade for $45, and I’ve been wanting to test one of those for a while. I didn’t get one with the 5102, but Anand sent me his BCM70012 mini-PCIe card and I managed to install it (see page three for details). The 5103 starts out at $400 from HP, or the configurable options start at $450 (with the current 12% off coupon). The Mini 5102 can be purchased online from Newegg and others for around $400 as well. What that means is you’re paying about $100 extra for the build quality, software, and any other extras.

Skipping back to the 5103, the configurator allows quite a few potentially interesting upgrades. There’s the aforementioned Crystal HD card, or you can get Mobile Broadband. LCD alternatives are also present: besides the standard WSVGA model, you can get a touchscreen WSVGA or go for a 1366x768 panel. The problem is that all of the interesting upgrades add to the price of an already expensive netbook. If you want 2GB RAM,  128GB SSD, the 768p LCD, Crystal HD, and the 6-cell battery, you can get the price up to $1000. For a netbook! Drop the SSD and you’re still approaching $700, though, which is frankly obscene for anything with an Atom CPU beating in the chassis.

Our test system is the basic $400 model available at MWave and other vendors, but HP shipped us the 6-cell battery for testing as well, and we added our own Crystal HD card. Those two upgrades bring the price to around $500 if you go that route, but let’s see what the HP 5102 can deliver before we decide if the upgrades are worth having.

HP Mini 5102 Impressions

Something you don’t immediately glean from the spec sheet is the build quality of the 5102. It’s not going to reach ThinkPad levels, but its far more solid feeling than any other netbook I’ve used. Initial impressions are that HP took their ProBook 5310m and used a shrink ray to create the Mini 5102 (and they also drastically shrank performance, naturally).

There’s an aluminum backing on the LCD cover, and soft-touch plastic on the palm rest. Build quality feels great, with a nice, rigid chassis that shows no flex. That comes courtesy of a magnesium alloy frame, complete with spill-resistant keyboard with a Mylar film underneath to protect from minor spills. HP also includes their 3D DriveGuard to protect the hard drive from damage caused by movement. The “3D” comes from the presence of multiple accelerometers to detect movement in all three axes.

Along with the positive aspects of the build quality, there are a few areas where we’d prefer something else. There’s glossy plastic spacing between the keyboard keys, and a glossy coating on the touchpad and bezel. The palm rest is also prone to showing oily marks from your hands, even after just a few minutes of use (in my experience). So, you really do get a very similar look to the ProBook, including the good and bad aspects.

The keyboard is one of the best parts of the 5102. Unlike so many other netbooks, this is a usable 10.1” keyboard. There’s a decent amount of space between the keys, and the keyboard uses all of the available area, going from the left to right edges of the chassis. Key travel is also good, and there’s absolutely no flex at all in the chassis. HP also touts the Durakey coating that helps keep the keys from becoming shiny (and keeps the letters from fading) over time. While fatigue from long bouts of typing can be a problem for me, and it’s particularly an issue with smaller keyboards, at least the Mini 5102 doesn’t leave me wanting to hurl the system against a wall after a few minutes.

Based purely on the feel of the system and keyboard, this is my favorite Atom netbook to date, but there are areas where it falls short. For one, the LCD is standard “junk”. ASUS had an awesome matte LCD in the 1001P (and the same goes for the glossy LCD in the 1005HA). The LG panel in the 5102 is bright but low contrast, similar to the panel in the 5310m (and worse than the panel in the Samsung N210). Going along with the LCD, I wish the touchpad and keyboard backing weren’t glossy; the touchpad in particular looked horribly greasy/smudged after just a few minutes of use. The touchpad is also of the non-multi-touch variety, which is another indication of the age of this particular design.

Battery life is slightly sub-par for a Pine Trail netbook, and the base 4-cell 29Wh battery is positively puny. HP claims up to 4.5 hours of battery life on the 4-cell battery, but in our best-case idle battery life test we just barely made it past four hours. If you’re using it “as intended” for shorter meetings and lunch trips, the 4-cell battery is fine, but if you want more there’s a 6-cell upgrade available. With the 6-cell 66Wh battery you can get around eight hours of moderate (i.e. Internet) use, and just shy of 10 hours light (idle) use, but ASUS managed nearly 11 hours with a smaller 58Wh battery in the 1001P. The 7200RPM hard drive might be partly to blame, and realistically most business users will be fine with eight hours, but it’s still odd that the 5102 can’t do better.

If you pick up the standard model for $400, the Mini 5102 is a nice netbook, but the paltry 29Wh battery is a real sore spot. Spending an extra $100 for better build quality and features is at least viable, but we would like all other areas to remain equal—and “equal” in this case means keeping up with the ASUS Eee PC and similar netbooks in battery capacity. If you don’t care too much about battery life and you’re looking for a classy sort of netbook as opposed to the cheap plastic options that are so readily available, the Mini 5102 is a good choice. Once you factor in the larger battery and a few other upgrades, though, it becomes clear that the “executive” part of the Mini also applies to the pricing structure.

Say Hello to the Broadcom Crystal HD

As we mentioned in the introduction, HP allows customers to order the Mini 5102 with a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder. The review sample didn’t include the decoder card (though the software was present, oddly enough), but Anand had one handy and shipped it my way for testing. Having never played with the Crystal HD before, and having read a few reviews online proclaiming it as a worthy upgrade for video fans, I was excited to test it out. First things first, though, you have to install the little bugger in the chassis, which it turns out is easier said than done.

The chassis is also designed well for anyone who wants to upgrade memory. It’s a completely tool-less operation that consists of removing the battery, then pushing in the left battery latch/cover release to pop off the memory cover. If you want to upgrade to 2GB RAM instead of the stock 1GB, things couldn’t be simpler! Getting to the HDD and extra mini-PCIe slot on the other hand requires some work.

If you want to take things to the next level and access the HDD, you’ll need to remove the keyboard first. Thankfully, HP has a detailed service manual available with instructions, but it’s still a bit of a pain and you’ll need to have a really small 2.0mm Phillips screwdriver handy. (Most laptops I’ve used work with my 3mm Phillips bit, so I had to run over to the local hardware store for this disassembly.)

For our purposes, we needed to go all the way and remove the top of the chassis in order to get at the internal mini-PCIe slot. This entails removing the four rubber feet—along with about 20 other screws—before you can pry off the top cover. You’ll also need a T8 Torx bit for the screws under the rubber feet. Annoying? Yes, it is, particularly since the sticky glue for the rubber feet can get a bit messed up in the process. Anyway, it’s not a difficult process, but it will take a bit of time. The final result is a completely “loaded” Mini 5102—and note that you can’t get mobile broadband and the CrystalHD decoder, so you have to choose one or the other.

So, now we’ve got our first Pine Trail system with a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder installed. How’s it work? That’s what we’ll cover next. (And if you want larger images, check out the gallery below.)

Multimedia Support with the Crystal HD

The BCM70012 is the slightly older version of the Crystal HD, but as far as we can tell there isn’t a huge difference with the newer BCM70015. With the card installed along with the latest 3.5.0 Broadcom drivers, we were all set to see what the Mini 5102 could do with our video suite.

If you weren’t aware, while it’s possible—just!—to view 720p H.264 encoded videos on an N450 CPU, it requires a highly efficient decoder like CoreAVC to avoid dropping frames. That’s what we normally use for our video playback/battery rundown test, and CPU usage hovers at around 80% with spikes up to 100% on occasion. Here’s what Perfmon looks like with a standard Pine Trail N450:

That’s a run with the HP 5102 without using the Crystal HD decoder. Here’s what happens with our same test video once we install the BCM70012 and enable the Broadcom decoder. For our tests, we’re using Media Player Classic Home Cinema and a 7Mbps (average) x264 video encode.

Enabling the Crystal HD decoder brings CPU usage down to 25% on average, with spikes up to just 40%—a pretty drastic reduction. What’s more, even 1080p video becomes playable on the Mini 5102 with the Broadcom decoder. Here’s what things look like before using CoreAVC:

CPU utilization is 98% average, and there are constant frame drops and stuttering audio. Our 12Mbps 1080p x264 video is absolutely unwatchable on a single-core Atom CPU right now, unless it gets some serious help. (Our understanding is that N550 with its dual-cores is able to handle this sort of video, albeit barely.) We’ve seen in the past that NVIDIA’s ION can offload H.264 decoding and provide smooth playback, so let’s see how the Crystal HD fares:

Rather impressive, really: CPU utilization is only slightly higher than the 720p video. Perhaps it’s a matter of only driving a 1024x600 panel, but at least you don’t need to worry about re-encoding videos for playback on a netbook.

So H.264 video playback worked well with the proper software and drivers. However, there’s more to multimedia than watching videos off your hard drive. What about surfing some popular video sites that use Flash 10.1 videos? Without the Crystal HD we’re able to watch SD videos… barely. 360p Hulu movies are just about smooth in fullscreen mode, but 480p really struggles. Here’s Hulu 480p without the Crystal HD:

We’re at 85% CPU usage and dropping frames… video is playing back at about 15FPS I’d guess (unfortunately, FRAPS wouldn’t give me a frame rate for some reason without the CrystalHD). Switch to hardware accelerated Flash 10.1 playback with the Broadcom chip and we get…

Okay, CPU usage dropped to 63%, and according to the Broadcom DTS_Info utility the Crystal HD decoder is active. The problem is, frame rates are still at around 15FPS. Ugh. YouTube didn’t fare much better; 480p video worked great fullscreen and enabled the Crystal HD; 360p worked fine but did all the work on the CPU. Meanwhile, 720p was dropping a lot of frames and running at anywhere between 10FPS and 18FPS (instead of 24FPS for the source video). Bumping up to 1080p didn’t change things—for better or for worse, interestingly enough. So our testing with YouTube HD was a failure; CPU usage dropped from nearly 100% to around 65%, but video playback wasn’t smooth at all.

What’s difficult to answer is whether this is a problem with the Broadcom decoder and Flash 10.1 video in general, or if it’s just an incompatibility with the Mini 5102 and the BCM70012. I started threads on the Adobe Flash forums, MyHPMini forums, and even tried emailing Broadcom support, all with no solution. There’s a thread here from the 10.1 beta that suggests changing the IGP memory from DVMT to a static 128MB might fix the problem, but unfortunately that’s not an option on the 5102 BIOS. Of course, the better fix would be if the Broadcom drivers and/or Flash properly allocated memory via DVMT and avoided this issue, but given Flash 10.1 is out of beta and the Broadcom drivers are at least a couple months old, I’m not holding my breath.

Something else worth noting is that the BCM70012 definitely gets hot when it’s in use. The bottom-right area of the palm rest is where the mini-PCIe slot sits, and with the Crystal HD installed and active temperatures can hit 43C (110F) after 5-10 minutes. It’s not hot enough to burn you, but it is uncomfortably warm and there’s no real airflow to that section of the chassis.

For now, Flash 10.1 support on Atom netbooks continues to be a far better experience with NVIDIA’s ION platform. I’ll try to get a different netbook to play with and see if the Crystal HD works properly there, or I may try doing Linux on the Mini 5102 to see how that goes since Broadcom released the drivers to open source. If all you want is better playback in MPC-HC, the Broadcom chip works as advertised. If you want HDMI output or Flash support, stick with ION (or just upgrade to i3/i5 ULV). Given my experience with the 5102, though, I wouldn’t spend the extra $45 for the upgrade.

HP Mini 5102 Performance

We’ve looked at the build quality and multimedia capabilities, but just to be complete here’s our standard netbook benchmarks.

There’s nothing too surprising here, though we would have expected a 7200RPM drive to do better in the PCMark tests. The gap between the fastest and slowest netbook here is small in most of the tests, but in PCMark05 it’s an 8% gap and in Vantage it grows to 23%, with the 5102 coming in near the bottom in both cases. We do clean up the excess utilities and bloatware that comes on most laptops, and Atom netbooks are typically so slow that they never feel “fast”. They get the job done for basic tasks and that’s about it.

Graphics performance isn’t really worth discussing. The 5102 places near the top of our Atom N450 group this time, but they’re less than half the performance of even the old CULV platform, let alone stuff like the AMD Nile offerings and Intel’s i3/i5 ULV platform.

HP Mini 5102 Battery Life

As mentioned earlier, we've got two batteries: the standard 4-cell 29Wh and the upgraded 6-cell 66Wh. We've run tests with both batteries, and we also tested a two use scenarios with the smaller battery and the Crystal HD chip. (We didn't want to run all the tests with the Crystal HD and the larger battery, as that would require another day or two of waiting for the battery to run down.)

The smaller battery sits flush with the chassis while the 6-cell battery is a bit thicker and will raise the rear of the 5102 about a quarter inch. It will also add a couple ounces to the weight, but the 5102 is still very portable. Here are the battery life results.

Battery life is on the lower end of the Atom spectrum. With the 29Wh battery, the 5102 manages just over two hours of video playback, but that goes up to nearly six hours with the 66Wh battery. We ran a couple quick sanity checks with the Crystal HD decoder installed and found that while CPU use dropped, battery life doesn’t improve thanks to the chip using more power. Battery life dropped 7-9% in the two tests with the BCM70012 installed. Idle battery life tops out at 4.25 hours with the smaller battery, and improves to 9.25 hours with the 66Wh battery.

Put into perspective, though, even the larger battery life figures are nothing special. ASUS manages to get nearly as much battery life with the 1001P and a 48Wh battery—better actually at idle. ASUS has traditionally done a good job at optimizing power draw on their netbooks, and there’s a big gap between the 1001P/1005PE and the rest of the N450 netbooks. The 5102 places just ahead of the Samsung N210 but slightly behind the other offerings.

HP Mini 5102 LCD: Matte but Meh

Like so many other LCDs, there's not much to praise on the Mini 5102 panel. It's matte, so it can be used outside, and it's reasonably bright. Other than that, it's low contrast and produces mediocre colors. Viewing angles are slightly better than most TN panels as well, but again it's not enough to elevate the LCD from the realm of mediocrity.

HP Mini 5102: Great Build, but Still Atom

Given we’re looking at a netbook that’s now past its prime, we’re still generally impressed with what the Mini 5102 offers. The build quality is far better than anything we’ve seen from a netbook to date, with the best keyboard in a 10” netbook we've ever used. It also comes with a matte screen that’s much easier to use outdoors, though contrast ratio is still poor. However, for $100 more than the competition this is essentially the same old Atom performance.

Granted, there are some other noteworthy extras. 802.11n networking, Gigabit Ethernet, and Bluetooth come standard in the ~$400 model available at various online sites, so connectivity is better than the vast majority of netbooks. The HP QuickSync software is also a potentially useful addition; if you don’t mind leaving your laptop plugged in and powered up when it’s not in use, you can have all the latest documents, images, email, etc. ready to go when you leave the office. For a quick lunch meeting, it might be a substitute for a smartphone that allows you to do a bit more typing and web browsing.

Determining what netbook is best for you is still a matter of compromise. If you want stellar battery life at a moderate price, ASUS’ Eee PC line wins, but the build quality of the 5102 is similarly head and shoulders above the competition. It’s unfortunate that we’re not reviewing the newer Mini 5103, because we’d like to see what DDR3 memory and the N475—or the dual-core N550—bring to the table. Given the similar pricing, even the base model 5103 is going to be the better choice these days, and we expect to see the 5102 inventory disappear over the coming weeks. If you start looking at more expensive netbooks, you can also add NVIDIA’s NG-ION platform to the mix.

In terms of multimedia capabilities, one thing we’re confident with stating is that NG-ION is much better than Broadcom’s Crystal HD decoder. Besides handling Flash video without problems the last time we tested, ION also gets you an HDMI port and typically a 768p display as well. NG-ION netbooks like the ASUS 1201PN also come priced similarly to the 5102/5103, but then the 1201PN is a 12” chassis—with 2GB RAM and a 250GB HDD standard. Anyway, while it’s possible the Crystal HD works better in other netbooks, unless the price is a lot lower than $425 we’d be inclined to go with the 1201PN.

Considering HP has already been on the ION bandwagon with the Mini 311, what would be awesome to see is something with the Mini 5102/5103 chassis (make it 12.1” if you have to), only put in NG-ION and a 66Wh battery and ship it with 2GB RAM and Windows Home Premium. If they can make that and keep the price of the laptop around $500, we’d have an awesome little multimedia device. For now, the Mini 5102 is a nice looking and well built take on Pine Trail and worth a look if you value build quality and durability over features and performance, or if you’re looking for a companion device with a business aesthetic. It’s more expensive than the competition, but the extra money does buy you the most solid netbook and the best 10.1” keyboard we’ve yet laid hands on.