When Asus brought its first Eee PC out in 2007 its success and appeal stunned everyone, but the company hasn’t rested on its lauresl, bringing out a slew of upgrades seemingly every week! The Asus Eee PC 1000HE is another with a USP to blow all other ultra-portable laptops out the netbook water: a 9.5-hour battery life!
Standing in the netbook urinal, the Asus Eee PC 1000HE gives all other netbooks stage fright when it flops out the 9.5-hour battery. Or at least that’s the claimed battery life from Asus. We only managed to squeeze 7 hours from the Asus Eee PC 1000HE, but that’s still immense! The compromise here, though, is the weight. That battery is hefty in terms of life and weight – leaving the Asus Eee PC 1000HE weighing 1.45kg.
The battery’s not the only upgrade, though. Under the delicious, smudge-magnet of a case, the Asus Eee PC 1000HE now has a chiclet-style keyboard with individual keyholes (like the new MacBooks) for easier typing. The ten-inch screen is a delight too, while the 160GB for storage is plenty big enough for carrying around your entire collection of Madonna back catalogues (why you’d want to is a different matter).
The rest of the specs are comparable to the rest of the netbook clan: 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N280 Processor, 1 GB RAM, Bluetooth, and it’s running Windows XP Home. It’s also got Wi-Fi, but why, for something that’s supposed to be the ultimate portable laptop, doesn’t it have 3G?
The immense battery life more than makes up for the lack of 3G and heard-it-all-before specs. And we can forgive its extra weight. But that extra expense? Well, that knocks off a star. Close, then Asus, but but no Havana.
