HP dv333ea review

HP's dv333ea showed up a little too late for last month's group test of entertainment notebooks.

It made a striking impression, though, with a total of 11 bright blue LEDs spread across the chassis - just part of what makes this an attractive-looking notebook.

Running the whole length of the front is a single grille that hides a capable set of Altec Lansing-branded speakers. They're excellent for notebook speakers and sound clear and well balanced. The chassis has all the ports you'll need, including a memory card reader and FireWire. The big 17" display has a native resolution of 1,440x900 pixels, giving you a generous-sized desktop. Our image tests looked good, but were marred a little by noticeable grain across the screen. Brightness wasn't great and vertical viewing angles were less than ideal. Our HD video test gave rich colours thanks to the display's gloss finish, but lacked vibrancy and looked a tad dull. It's not a bad display, but we'd expect better from an entertainment notebook.

The dv333ea is bundled with an ExpressCard/34 DVB-T tuner. ExpressCards are still rare. Despite the novelty, we'd prefer a built-in tuner. You also have to install the card's software yourself, although this is straightforward. More annoying is the way it protrudes untidily from the right-hand side of the notebook; it also requires an adaptor for the RF input.

Basic viewing is fine, although channel changes could be smoother. The full-sized remote control is one of the best we've seen, with a great layout and clearly labelled buttons. However, there's no timeline electronic programme guide (EPG), with just a list of programs on each individual channel. Worse, you can't schedule recordings from this list. Instead, you have to use a manual scheduling system. It's a disappointment from such a slick-looking interface. However, the twin 80GB hard disks do allow a lot of space for recordings.

Gaming is better supported with the Nvida GeForce Go 7600 graphics chipset, producing a playable 42.6fps in our Doom 3 test. This is due to the card's 256MB of dedicated memory, plus it has a higher clock speed than Acer's Aspire (below). It will play any modern game, but not necessarily at the screen's high native resolution. Application performance is respectable, with an Intel Core Duo T2300E processor and 1GB of RAM sufficient for all but the toughest tasks. Battery life was an impressive four hours, although at 3.7kg you're unlikely to take it far.

The dv333ea is an attractive notebook that doesn't quite live up to its looks. The display is disappointing and the TV tuner software lacks common features. Still, it's extremely well priced for what you get.