To say that netbooks have historically been hobbled by Intel’s integrated graphics is to unfairly ignore their slow single-core CPUs, 1GB RAM maximum, miniscule keyboards, and awkward screen resolutions. It’s an unfair assertion, of course­—netbooks came into existence to be cheap, portable, low-powered machines. But the definition of netbook has been stretched, to the point where HP’s new Mini 311, while still considered a netbook, has an 11.6-inch 1366x768 screen, Nvidia integrated graphics, a large keyboard, and can support up to 3GB of DDR3 RAM, for less than $500.

At first, the Mini 311 looks a lot like any other 11.6-inch netbook on the market: Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 3 USB ports, and a somewhat squashed keyboard. But the RAM is DDR3/1333, not the typical DDR2/667, and it’s soldered to the mainboard­, leaving a SODIMM slot free for an additional 2GB of RAM. The screen has a maximum resolution of 1366x768, significantly better than the standard 1024x600—for one thing, websites and programs built for 1024x768 won’t break. And thanks to the Ion platform, the Mini 311 can display 720p HD video, and output 1080p over the HDMI port—that’s right, a netbook with an HDMI port.

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High-definition video files were meant to be seen on big-screen televisions, not your 19-inch PC monitor. But getting these files—either personally ripped from high-def sources or downloaded from the Internet—from your desktop to the living room has always been a cumbersome process. Users previously had the option of streaming over a network to devices like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, which have restrictive file compatibility, or they could use a dedicated video player like Western Digital’s WD TV, which could only play back files from attached USB drives. The new WD TV Live, however, comes with a much-needed Ethernet port, and along with the addition of other new hardware and software features, is the best video streamer we’ve tested yet.

Like its predecessor, the WD TV Live doesn’t actually store any media. Plug portable hard drives filled with your movies, music, and photos into the player’s two USB ports and it’ll output the content to your home theater via either an HDMI, composite, or component video connection (also added since the original design). And while the first WD TV supported a host of popular file types, format compatibility on this successor is even more impressive. In our tests, high-bitrate 1080p videos encoded with MPEG, Xvid, H.264, or WMV codecs played without a hitch, even when housed in a variety of file containers, like Matroska MKVs. You can also play videos with multiple audio tracks, soft subtitles, and even DTS audio—a big omission in the last iteration. We only ran into problems on a few occasions, most notably with WMV 9–encoded files that wouldn’t play audio, and raw video recorded from high-end digital cameras.

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