It's finally there. Three months after the launch and over a month after our brief hands-on look, HP's Pavilion dv2 notebook has become available from the official HP online store.
This system is one of a kind, treading the gray area between netbook and ultra-portable laptop with a high-res display, a single-core AMD processor, decent integrated graphics, and a thin-and-light form factor. Bad news if you had $700 saved up for the launch, though: the dv2 starts at $749.99 right now, despite HP telling everyone it would cost 50 bucks less in January.
Still, the dv2 has a nice mix of hardware for the price and size. The base config includes a 12.1" 1280x800 display, a 1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor, 4GB of DDR2 RAM (no, really), Mobility Radeon HD 3410 integrated graphics with HDMI output, a 320GB hard drive, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a six-cell battery, and an external DVD burner. No eight-year-old operating systems here, either: the dv2 comes with a full-fledged copy of Windows Vista Home Premium x64.
The single-core CPU may seem a bit light next to all that nice hardware, but it should perform much better than a similarly clocked Atom—and it still has a tight 15W thermal envelope. The dv2 is more about mobility than number-crunching power, anyway. HP notes that the laptop weighs only 3.95 lbs, is just 0.9-1.3" thick, and features a "lustrous magnesium-aluminum alloy casing."
