Back to School Review: HP's DM1 Laptop is a Versatile Little 12” Beast

System Build Quality and Design

The DM1 is not necessarily built any differently from any other HP laptop   you’d find in their lineup. The difference, though, is that HP has decided  to  make their laptops easier to repair. As you’ll find with other future  HP  laptops, they have opted to make the entire bottom panel of the laptop  easily  removable which then gains you easy access to all of the critical  components in  the laptop. This not only will reduce the cost of servicing  such a laptop, but  it also lets consumers to possibly do more on their  own. Furthermore, they  decided to opt for a 180 degree rotating display  which you won’t find on many  laptops outside of Lenovo ThinkPads.  Admittedly, the outside design isn’t  anything revolutionary or different  from their current generation of laptops as  we’ve seen this sort of design  in the past… but the DM1 is still a very unique  system that picks  strengths from both laptops and netbooks and chooses them in  the right way  to create a very whole solution.


Easy access components as you can see above. There's even room for a broadband modem.


Not-so-matching sticks of RAM.

 
Also, due to  the thinness of the DM1, we were able to replace our notepad  in our  leather planner book with the DM1. So instead of carrying around a pen  and  paper inside of the leather planner, we carried around a pen and the Dm1. Needless to say, some people were pleasantly surprised to see us pull out  a  laptop from inside of a leather planner.


Showing the relative thickness as well as the HDMI and USB ports.


The laptop shown at its thickest point, note the charging port, Kensington Lock port, and heatsink vents. 


The other ports on the DM1 show a headphone jack, two more USB ports, a VGA port, and a covered RJ-45 ethernet port.

Accessories

The DM1 we received was fairly minimal on the side of accessories, we did  receive a BluRay drive (external) with the DM1 but those aren’t available now  when you try to configure a DM1 on HP’s website. You’ll also get the standard  6-Cell battery and power charger along with the manual and installation CDs.