HP ProBook 5310m: Best Small Business Notebook ~ MY BLOG

A business-friendly ultraportable with a sleek design, strong performance, and good battery life.

Up until now, small businesses with modest IT budgets have faced a difficult choice: purchase an affordable but bulky system targeted at them, or a low-cost consumer ultraportable without the build quality or business-friendly features they require. With the aggressively priced ProBook 5310m, Hewlett Packard has served notice on the industry: you can now get a high-quality business ultraportable for well under $1,000. Its competitors will have to respond.

Design

The ProBook 5310m isn’t the lightest ultraportable on the market, but it bests or comes close to its higher-priced competitors. At 12.9 x 8.7 x 0.9 inches and 3.8 pounds, the 5310m is significantly lighter and thinner than the HP ProBook 4310s (4.4 pounds, 1.1 inches thick) and the Dell Latitude E4300 (3.8 pounds, 1.3 inches). It’s also the same thickness (but about 0.4 pounds heavier) than the Lenovo ThinkPad X301, which costs more than $1,800. Twelve-inch systems such as the Toshiba Portégé R600 (2.4 pounds, 0.8 inches thick) and Lenovo ThinkPad X200s (3.2 pounds, 1.4 inches) are lighter, but the R600 costs well over $2,000, and the X200s is much thicker.

The ProBook 5310m looks much sexier than its $699 starting price would indicate. The black anodized aluminum lid and deck, sleek island keys, and durable magnesium rubberized bottom make the 5310m sexy enough for the club room while staying conservative enough for the boardroom. Though it has a similar shape and keyboard layout to the HP ProBook 4310s, the 5310m’s piano black color, thin lines, and subtle status lights give it a much more sophisticated look than its sibling, which lacks the aluminum and magnesium materials.

Like many ultraportables today, the ProBook 5310m saves space by eschewing an optical drive. But these days, the optical drive is becoming less important, as you can download virtually any program and media file you might need. For those who occasionally read data off of a DVD, HP offers an external USB optical drive, or you can get a third party drive online for less than $50.