We’ve been reading a lot lately about the consumerization trend in the enterprise, and the convergence of the enterprise and consumer worlds. Judging by HP’s latest business notebook though, the Compaq 6910p, that convergence hasn’t yet come to the notebook space.
Don’t get me wrong. The 6910p is a quality notebook that I enjoyed testing. HP has positioned it as a business notebook, and it fills that role rather well.
A colleague of mine was testing one of HP’s lower-priced consumer entertainment notebooks at the same time however, which made me wonder why HP can’t bring that attractive new Piano Black finish and the lovely BrightView display finish to its business line? (BrightView is available as a custom option). Business users want a good looking notebook too.
Getting down to business
That gripe aside, as a business notebook the 6910p fits the bill. It continues the consistent design of HP’s business notebook lineup, with a basic gray and black colour scheme. The 14.1-inch display is an adequate size for the business traveler, big enough to be comfortably readable, while still maintaining portability. And speaking of portability, the 6910p weighs-in at 5.1 lbs, with the AC adapter adding another pound. Not exactly ultraportable, but my shoulder didn’t complain.
The full querty keyboard offered no problems, and for pointing both a touchpad and trackball are included. I’m not a trackball fan, I find them awkward. However, the touchpad was easy to use, and the rubberized mouse keys were a nice touch.
One thing I wasn’t a fan of were the nearly invisible touch-sensitive buttons across the keyboard for control of functions like volume, and turning-off the wireless antenna.
The 6910p boasts ample ports and features, including a built-in mic, biometric fingerprint scanner, SD/MMC port as well as the standard peripheral ports. The headphone jack is well positioned on the left side, as are the three USB ports, one on the right and two stacked horizontally on the left.
Under the hood
Moving inside, the 6910p comes with the 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo processor and just over 1GB of RAM, expandable to just over 4GB. Running multiple applications did not impair system performance. A 120GB hard drive is standard.
I was quite pleased with the wireless, which is Intel-based offering 802.11a/b/g. Other then the above-mentioned antenna-button issue, finding and connecting to hot spots was a breeze.
I found the battery performance to be average. You can probably stretch it well past three hours with the brightness turned right down and the WiFi turned off. Turn on the wireless though and that drops. Watching a DVD on the airplane at medium contrast I managed about two-hours.
The only major problem I had with this notebook wasn’t even with HP but rather with the OS manufacturer, Microsoft. My demo unit was running Windows Vista Business, which for some reason doesn’t ship with the common Codecs needed to play DVDs. Only consumer editions of Vista do; I guess Microsoft figures business-people don’t need to play DVDs. I didn’t discover this until onboard my transcon flight, which meant four hours reading the in-flight magazine. Once on the ground and on the Web, with some searching I was able to download the needed codecs from a third-party Web site; Microsoft had wanted me to pay them for an upgrade instead.
Summary
While it would be nice to see HP get more creative by bringing some of their consumer innovations to their business lineup, as a business notebook the 6910p stacks up well with the Lenovo ThinkPads of the world and its other competitors in the space. Starting at $1,399, it’s a good fit for the business-person requiring a notebook for a mix of road and office use.
