Laptop Watch: HP Pavilion dm3t

If you’re in the market for a laptop at the price of a netbook, you might want to hold on for this one. Product cycles don’t refresh as soon as the west, but this one combines cutting edge design with full-day battery life.
Starting at $549, the Pavilion dm3t has a design derived from Intel’s 2010 lineup of CULV processors - the dm3t comes in a magnesium-aluminum alloy shell and a form factor that is just one-inch thick. Weighing about 1.8 kgs, it’s packing an Intel Pentium U5400 processor, optimised for thin laptops (Intel Pentium U5400 - 1.20 GHz, 3MB L3 Cache) and claims 7.5 hours of battery life on a standard 6-cell battery. This should help improve the performance over last year’s version that looks fairly klunkier and plebian - this PCmag review has the beef.
“Despite its sleek design, it's hard to recommend the HP Pavilion dm3-1030us as your lone or primary laptop. Its performance simply lags too far behind the dual-core competition, and the gains in battery life aren't enough to justify the performance hit.”
This year’s design has a sleek metallic finish complemented by a neat looking chiclet keyboard (optionally backlit), HDMI, VGA ports and Intel HD graphics with your choice of Windows 64-bit OS and upto 8 GB of RAM. We expect this laptop to be available in India someday, and will keep you posted on any price and product details as we can get them.

Key Specs and features:

Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium
A compact case: less than 1" thick and just 3.99 lb.1
A black soft-touch cover
Support for system memory up to 8GB DDR3
Support for hard drive up to 640GB4
A silvery island-style keyboard with click pad
Integrated Gigabit Ethernet LAN
Three USB ports, one of which is shared with an eSATA port
A built-in VGA port for connecting a monitor
An optional backlit keyboard
An optional external CD/DVD drive for installing software (the dm3t has no internal optical drive), or choose the Blu-ray drive5 for ultimate 1080p video

Press release:

Thin and light, the HP Pavilion dm3 notebook PC is literally a cool notebook. Innovative HP CoolSense Technology combines advanced hardware and intelligent cooling software to pioneer a notebook that feels noticeably cooler and automatically adjusts cooling levels according to a customer’s personal preferences.
Advanced materials – metal alloys, soft-touch paint and non-conductive surfaces – plus strategically placed vents minimize heat and channel it away from the bottom of the PC for optimal comfort.
HP Thermal Assistant software detects how the PC is being used – for example, around the house or on a desk – and an accelerometer automatically shifts into either a maximum cooling mode or maximum performance mode based on the customer’s choice.
With HP Fences, users can effortlessly organize desktop multimedia content, such as photos, music and videos, by categories, then access them quickly, keeping the desktop uncluttered.
The HP Pavilion dm3 includes a 13.3-inch diagonal HD(2) display, an island-style keyboard with optional backlit feature and a stylish and durable metal finish with soft-touch surfaces in matte black.
Offering up to 7.5 hours of battery life(5) and measuring less than 1-inch thin, the HP Pavilion dm3 gives consumers the ideal balance of mobility and performance in an affordable, slim and light notebook PC.