Everyone is showing 10-inch netbook with Intel’s N550 dual-core Atom processor at CES, but HP has something more special for the visitors. At slightly less than 1 inch thick and 3.5 pounds, the dm1 is one of the first laptops to use AMD’s new Fusion platform, which is powered by AMD’s new “APU,” an accelerated processing unit. AMD’s new platform combines a traditional CPU and better-than-integrated graphics (and DirectX 11 support) on a single chip. The CPU is AMD’s new 1.6GHz dual-core E350, “fusion” with AMD Radeon HD 6310M graphics.

HP promises more than 10 hours of battery life from the dm1, though I can’t seem to find where this is based on. Standby? Anyway, Asus’s EeePC already managed to squeeze out over 11 hours using a simple Intel Atom processor, so we should probably see netbook battery life race of over 10 hours coming this year. There’s also optional hard drives capacity of up to 750GB, with integrated GPS, and an external Blu-ray drive. Standard is HP ProtectSmart’s hard-drive-locking capability, which is the same kind of HDD accelerometer, found in many business laptops.

The dm1 also includes HP’s CoolSense technology, which essentially is a user-adjustable fan control, for setting your ideal system temperature; this should come in handy to have, but I doubt most owners would bother to tweak. I won’t be surprised if they don’t even know what this CoolSense app on their laptop is.

The HP Pavilion dm1 is expected to be available January 9 in the United States, with a starting price of $449.99. Let’s see how it stacks up with Apple’s MacBook Air.

SOURCE via CNET