Features - QuickPlay (cont.)

If you press the music button of QuickPlay, it should take about 11 seconds to boot into the music function of QuickPlay.

The interface is fairly straightforward, and unlike the DVD interface, it contains all the visual indicators (volume, mute, play, pause, etc.). The main difference between the two is that the music menu doesn't encompass the whole screen. In fact, it only takes up a portion. It would be nice if HP had utilized the widescreen aspect ratio of the screen to create a larger visual interface. This, in turn, would allow for larger visual indicators. The issue of a larger visual interface is our biggest complaint about QuickPlay's music function, as all other visual issues stem from that.



Click to enlarge.


Everything is very intuitive, which is definitely a plus, and shows that HP put a decent amount of forethought into the design. Though, we should note that we constantly found ourselves hitting Enter (which does nothing in both DVD and music mode), instead of the "OK" button.



Click to enlarge.


Features – QuickPlay (cont.) Features – Hardware
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  • Biochem101 - Thursday, October 28, 2004 - link

    Ohh yeah, just to add.

    The dv1040us machine has at the minimum the following specs:

    Centrino 725 1.6GHz CPU 2mb cache
    64 mb shared video memory (cry, but im dealing with it)
    Those are the only differnces that stand out from the AT review model.
  • Biochem101 - Thursday, October 28, 2004 - link

    I just picked one of these puppies up for ~1100 AR. When I was shopping, I was looking for a very portable laptop with some performnce. So far I love it. The screen seems to have a built in anti-glare film similar to the film used on my Sony Trinitron CRT. It provides adequate glare relief in most situations. I did notice the font blur and was somewhat dissappointed with that problem. But all in all, I found a compact, light and relatively powerful laptop with great battery performance. I havent done any performance tests on the machine yet (its the 1.6G version - dv1040us model), but I doubt there will be much difference between my machine and he one AT has reviewed here.

    imho- im glad a ran across this review, I was just looking for some info on the general performance of the chipset in the machine, not a machine specific review. KUDOS to AT for souping up their number of reviews.
  • Pete - Sunday, October 24, 2004 - link

    BTW, the glare on this laptop was pretty harsh when I viewed it in CompUSA, although there was a very bright fluorescent light directly behind my shoulder. My eyes got tired looking at it after 15 mins, whereas the "regular" LCD on the Toshiba next to it was *very* easy to read.

    It's not just that the dv1000's screen was glossy, either. Cleartype fonts looked kind of blurry or oily, not nice at all. Actually, it's possible the screen was something like BGR, and Cleartype was set for RGB subpixel smoothing. I'll have to look into that, as the screen is this laptop's Achilles heel, and one too big for me to ignore.
  • Pete - Sunday, October 24, 2004 - link

    No, but a faster video card will, and the BenQ Joybook 7000 has the same formfactor and screen with a Mobility Radeon 9700 to boot! I'm convinced that would sell like hotcakes here, and I'm not sure why either HP or BenQ haven't started selling them here. Apparently this Intel IGP scores 2.5K in 3DM2001, not even 2003--frickin' abysmal. I'm not even sure it'd be fast enough for something like Age of Mythology or Warcraft 3 at this screen's native res.

    Andrew, start pushing Anandtech's weight around to get a laptop with this formfactor and discrete graphics in the USA! :)
  • airfoil - Thursday, October 7, 2004 - link

    Quote: "but for another $100 or $150, you can configure your DV1000 with a 1.7GHz Pentium-M 735 or 1.8GHz Pentium-M 745, respectfully."

    Respectfully? Does a faster prcoessor buy more respect?
  • trikster2 - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link

    #3 that's really strange. 2gb just to play a DVD sounds excessive

    #4 Not sure who the ODM is but there is a Benq Joybean that is identicle

    #3 my main reservation with this notebook is the brightview or whatever screen. The ones I've seen on sony and fujitsu's at frys have a lot of glare. I dumped my CRT for an LCD due to glare (lots of windows) would hate to be fighting glare on a glossy laptop screen too.

    In comparison to a CRT, how bad is the glare on this laptop?

    Thanks!



  • SDA - Sunday, October 3, 2004 - link

    Question-- who makes this notebook? (I know it has an HP sticker, but IIRC HP don't make their own notebooks like.) I ask because I'd like to see if there are any nearly identical no-name equivalents available.
  • AndrewKu - Saturday, October 2, 2004 - link

    #2 - Windows is reading it wrong.
  • Scarceas - Saturday, October 2, 2004 - link

    The article says a 2GB partition is used for the quickplay system.

    The screen shot shows 204MB. 204MB seems more reasonable. Might want to update that.
  • CasmirRadon - Saturday, October 2, 2004 - link

    Sounds great, if/when my old Presario notebook craps out on me in the next year or so this will be the kind of form-factor/functionality that I will be looking for. My friend just got a Pavillion, and I must say that it makes me jealous if only for the exceedingly convenient placement of headphone/usb ports. That is the kind of feature that many of us forget to look for when shopping for a notebook, but makes all the difference after extended use.

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