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Just announced: HP Pavilion dv9500t

The new HP dv9500t is built on Intel's new Santa Rosa platform.

Michelle Thatcher Former Senior Associate Editor, Laptops
Tech expert Michelle Thatcher grew up surrounded by gadgets and sustained by Tex-Mex cuisine. Life in two major cities--first Chicago, then San Francisco--broadened her culinary horizons beyond meat and cheese, and she's since enjoyed nearly a decade of wining, dining, and cooking up and down the California coast. Though her gadget lust remains, the practicalities of her small kitchen dictate that single-function geegaws never stay around for long.
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Michelle Thatcher
2 min read
CNET

Exactly which new laptops will debut with Intel's Santa Rosa platform may be the worst-kept secret in the tech world. Which is why it brings us some relief to report that at least one of the systems to be built on Santa Rosa has officially been announced.

At a morning event in Shanghai (that's evening here, thanks to the curvature of the Earth), HP revealed the Pavilion dv9500t, a follow-up to the desktop replacement dv9000 series. Aside from the new components, the dv9500t is very similar to its predecessor, with only a few small tweaks to the feature set, such as adding a fingerprint reader and integrating a more video-friendly Webcam. Unfortunately, some of the options that are currently available on the dv9000, such as discrete graphics and an HD DVD drive, won't come to the dv9500t for another month or so. Still, it's a solid entertainment laptop, especially considering its affordable starting price of $1,199.

We've had a Pavilion dv9500t review unit in our Labs for a few days now and were able to run it through our suite of benchmark tests. When it came to performance, the laptop kept pace with other yet-to-be-announced Santa Rosa systems. We're most excited, though, about the Pavilion dv9500t's battery life: it lasted 2 hours, 42 minutes in our taxing DVD battery-drain tests. That's amazing for a laptop with a 17-inch screen.

We'll be posting the full review Wednesday morning, so stay tuned for the complete results.

Update: Follow the link to our review of the HP Pavilion dv9500t.