In concurrence with the International Consumer Electronics Show that kicks off in Las Vegas on Thursday, Hewlett-Packard has announced its ‘ultraportable’ - the new Pavilion dv2, featuring the latest Athlon Neo chip from Advanced Micro Devices. Available from the second quarter, the starting price of the notebook will be $699; and for standard configurations, it will cost $899.

Ultraportables are an extremely stylish category of laptops, which are slim and light along with being fairly expensive – generally in the price range from $1500 to $3000. The MacBook Air from, the Portege from Toshiba, and the Vaio TT series from Sony are the designs that fall in this boutique category of laptops.

Though other available ultraportables weigh between 2.5 and 3 pounds, the dv2, weighing 3.8 pounds, is somewhat heavier - with battery and charger, it weighs 4.3 lb. Moreover, at 0.9-inches thickness, it is somewhat thicker too than other similar notebooks.

The dv2 comes enclosed in a blend of magnesium-aluminum alloy and black or white plastic. It has a 12-in. BrightView LED screen and an AMD Athlon 1.6-GHz Neo MV-40 mobile processor. It is up to the users to either choose an external LightScribe DVD-RW drive or an external Blu-ray DVD player.

In an update about the Pavilion dv2, prior to the CES trade show, Kevin Wentzel, HP’s technical marketing manager for consumer notebooks, said: “The typical ultraportable costs between $1,600 and $2,400. We are offering ultraportables that anyone can afford.”