he HP dm3 is sturdier, stylish and a better portable when compared to the other laptops. Its exterior appears business-like since its keyboard area is passive. The shiny black plastic surrounds an inset LED display of 13 inches and aloft it, you have an optimized Webcam of low light. You can also see metal dominates that are brushed solid giving the device, an ancient feel of the movie, ‘Terminator.’

The keyboard areas/palm rest and the external surfaces are metal. But the inner lid, hinges and the bottom portion are plastic. The complete package feels durable and compact. The dm3 has a solid feel and is heavy on account of its thick profile. The external lid’s aluminum theme which is brushed dark gray extends to the area of palm rest and the keyboard tray inside.

A black keyboard which is elevated feels comfy with soft keys. The touch pad having a glossy mirror, though attractive, does not have proper controls and sometimes prevent you from making smooth movements , thereby creating a frustrating experience of multi-touch. Mirrored buttons are present beneath the area of the medium size pad which is smooth providing a modest click even though the keys are slightly hard.

To the left, you have a power cord which projects out awkwardly and the power button has a strange shape and is placed oddly to the right and you have many USB ports on its front. The silver button needs to be slid forward to be activated, which is impulsive as well as difficult to find and operate quickly. The HP laptop has a gleamy LED display of 13 inches, with a native resolution, 1,366×768 pixels.

The screen exhibited great brightness and crisp colors, but at times, you have to ‘Auto-adjust’ the brightness in strange ways. The speakers are implanted below the laptop and it produced good volume and quality of sound. You have the basic ports like HDMI, separate microphone and headphone jacks, four USB 2.0 ports and an SD card slot. The RAM can be upgraded to 8GB.

The other features are Bluetooth, Ethernet and 802.11n Wi-Fi. An external Blu-ray drive is available for $150 extra which is optional. Many features present may be removed or added to adjust the price down or up according to your choice. The laptop featuring a dual core processor is pretty good at multi-tasking though not marvelous. The dm3 does not feature discrete graphics.

The laptop can stream and play HD video perfectly but it cant play the mainstream games except the casual games of the web and Zombies-Plants level fare. But the device can manage personal and office tasks easily. For a powerful boost in graphics, an ‘Nvidia GeForce’ GPU featuring a memory of 512MB may be added which is again, optional at a price of $50 extra.

HP laptop has a 6-cell battery that offers a lifetime of 7 hours and 10 minutes which is stunning while using video playback continuously. In normal conditions of casual use, the laptop offers even more battery life. Since an internal optical drive is absent in the device, you have to load your movies on the hard drive.

HP offers a 1 year warranty of industry standards for labor and parts. Telephone support which is toll free is present 24*7 applicable in the period of warranty. The Company website provides chat in real time with a representative of technical support. If you wish to troubleshoot the technical problems yourself, then you have to search in the website’s detailed database of FAQ.