HP Pavilion DV2800t Artist Edition

Originally called the "Asian Odyssey," the HP Pavilion dv2800t Artist Edition laptop was born of a design contest held by HP and MTV in 2007 in which Jo�o Oliveira, a design student from Portugal, took top prize with his striking, Japan cool graphics. The gimmick, then, is that this laptop is designed by a young person for other young people and therefore offers all the features young people want media playback, easy Web surfing and connectivity, style, and comfort. And the Artist Edition does perform pretty well in these categories just don't expect much in terms of gaming.

The first thing you'll notice about the Artist Edition is, of course, its case design. On its glossy lid, you'll find Oliveira's eye popping smorgasbord of cyan and orange shapes, a Chinese dragon, samurai silhouettes, bonsai trees, a yin and yang, and more. This design continues on the notebook's palm rests, and is also featured on the mustard colored canvas messenger bag that comes with the system.

The Artist Edition's brown, painted keyboard provides just the right amount of spring; we found long typing sessions to be very comfortable.

The system's glossy 14.1 inch wide screen display and 5.6 pound weight make this it a very suitable travel notebook, yet it's large enough for enjoyable DVD viewing. In fact, media playback is one of the Artist Edition's strong points.

Its glossy 1,280x800 resolution LCD rarely becomes distracting, whether used under bright lights or outside, and its Altec Lansing speakers deliver good kick there's also an ExpressCard slot, where you can store the included HP Mobile Remote. Like many of HP's media-centered notebooks, the system features blue backlit multimedia control buttons above the keyboard. Just below the roomy, gold colored touch pad, you'll find dual headphone jacks, so two people can listen to music or watch a film without distracting others.

With all this multimedia goodness, we expected the notebook's 6 cell battery to have performed a bit better on our DVD rundown test. We squeezed out 1 hour and 54 minutes with the screen brightness set to maximum and all power saving features disabled. Our $1,250 review unit came with plenty of great features a 220GB hard drive, a Webcam, a multiformat DVD burner with LightScribe technology, and plenty of connectivity options, including Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, a 5 in 1 card reader, a FireWire jack, and HDMI out. Library bound students and other on the go users will appreciate the included Kensington lock slot as well.

The Artist Edition did fairly well on our performance tests. Our system came with a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU and 2GB of RAM; currently, however, this particular CPU is not being offered on HP's online store. (You can opt for the slightly slower 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7250, or one of Intel's new mobile Penryn models). Our review unit delivered a decent 3,116 on Futuremark's PCMark Vantage, we couldn't get the system to run PCMark05.

As expected, the Artist Edition shined on our multimedia tests: It needed just 4 minutes and 24 seconds to complete our iTunes conversion test, and 7 minutes and 8 seconds for our Windows Media Encoder 9 trial. The notebook's Cinebench 9.5 and Cinebench 10 scores (684 and 4,263, respectively) were decent, if not exceptional.