As some of you may know Compaq these days is a lowly subsidiary of the mighty HP corporation.

They have however managed to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat with the simply stunning Compaq mini 700.

The HP mini 1000 is a serious piece of netbooking hardware but at well over £400 has some serious competition.

The mini 700 from Compaq which is pretty much a mini 1000 by another name retails from £269  and manages the following specification:

Intel Atom N270 1.6Ghz processor which to be fair is pretty standard

1GB RAM

Windows XP Home SP3

60GB SATA Hard disk drive

SD/MMC card reader

The baby model has 802.11 b/g Wireless LAN and the grown up model also throws in HSDPA 3G mobile broadband capability (takes your 3G data sim card for mobile broadband minus dongle)

Bluetooth, 2 USB 2 ports, RJ45 Ethernet, 10.2″ WSVGA High Definition HP LED BrightView display with 1024×600 resolution, Webcam with integrated microphone and 92% full size keyboard.

Sadly it has only a 3 cell battery as standard and the mouse pad has the nasty left and right positioned mouse buttons but did I mention that it looks like this????

And you can get this fabulous looking netbook absolutely free, right now through netbookplanet.co.uk by signing up to a mobile broadband contract with 3 Mobile network from only £20 per month.

If you would rather own one of the compaq gems outright from the off then they are now available for just £269.

We love this pretty little netbook very much indeed having spent a lot of time getting to know it recently.  If you want to know what its like to live with the Compaq Mini then check out our Compaq Mini 700 long term review.