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HP Pavilion dv3510nr: Best Buy's Blue Label laptop wins Editors' Choice award

HP Pavilion dv3510nr, the first of two Best Buy Blue Label laptops, wins an Editors' Choice award from CNET Reviews

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
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Matt Elliott
2 min read

CBS Interactive

With the HP Pavilion dv3510nr, Best Buy's Blue Label laptop program is off to a hot start. It packs a ton of features and performance in a sleek, 13-inch frame and earned itself an Editors' Choice award in the process.

What is Blue Label, you ask? It's a new program where Best Buy takes input from its customers and then works with its vendors to create a laptop that serves up the features its customers want most. According to Best Buy, the features its customers wanted most in a laptop are longer battery life, a thin and lightweight design but with a roomy screen, and a backlit keyboard--all backed with "superior" support. The HP Pavilion dv3510nr hits on all of these points, and it looks good doing it.

It offers an attractive alternative to another popular, 13-inch laptop, the Apple MacBook. The MacBook, too, won an Editors' Choice, though for different reasons than the Pavilion dv3510nr. While many rightfully point out that the MacBook's core specifications and expansion options are lacking for the money, we thought it more than made up for those deficiencies with its new aluminum chassis, huge trackpad, and the iLife software bundle. Whether you like the Pavilion dv3510nr's bronze color is a matter of taste, but you can't argue with its long list of features that includes the Centrino 2 platform, a backlit keyboard and media control keys, a fingerprint reader, a remote control, and HDMI and eSATA ports. It's also $200 cheaper than the cheapest MacBook (excluding the old, white model).

After comparing the two line by line, which do you feel is the 13-inch laptop to own?