With the Asus Eee PC shredding up laptop charts (yes, apparently there are laptop charts now) and shooting to near overnight success thanks to its light weight and low price tag, other laptop manufacturers are practically falling over themselves to join in.

So it’s not really a huge surprise that HP, one of the largest PC manufacturers in the world, would want a piece of that market. This is the Mini-note – it weighs in at just 1.18kg, has an 8.9″, 1280 x 768 screen, runs on a VIA processor and offers either a 64GB solid state drive running SUSE Linux or Windows XP / Vista on a 160GB HDD. It is set to cost $500 for the Linux model or $600 for the Windows one…