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With the Asus Eee PC 1201N, the pioneer of the netbook’s rewritten what to expect from an ultra portable. Gone are the old specs you could recite from memory, and in come useful features like a speedier processor, HD graphics and a 12-inch screen, only on a budget. Is this what the Nokia Booklet 3G should have been? Read on and find out in our review.
The Asus Eee PC 1201N is almost unrecognisable from the Eee PC 701 that kick started the netbook revolution two years ago. Instead of a WVGA, 7-inch display, Windows XP and puny hardware, you’ve got a 12.1-inch screen capable of 720p video, 250GB of hard drive space, 2GB of RAM, Windows 7, a dual core Atom 1.6GHz chip, and a HDMI out port for hooking it up to an HDTV.
12 inches is bordering on the full on laptop size, but the Asus Eee PC 1201N’s light weight (1.46kg), and slim form factor mean this will still sit snugly in your man bag. It echoes the Seashell design of the 1005HA and 1008HA, with a tapered, thin case, with some traces of sparkly blue glitter, that’s still surprisingly sturdy. Like the 1005HA, it’s got open ports on the side, and a removable battery, which we found lasted a full four hours even with Wi-Fi on, screen brightness up, and plenty of video guzzling and web surfing.
Read our Nokia Booklet 3G review now
Video is key here, as the other new addition to the Eee line with the Eee PC 1201N is Nvidia’s Ion chipset. It’s the first Asus Eee to pack dedicated graphics, and now with the onset of GPU support for Flash, it means streaming, on-demand high def telly. We loaded up the latest version of Flash on the Asus Eee PC 1201N, and it works a treat with HD video on YouTube and Vimeo, chugging through frames almost as merrily as it does locally stored files. You can see some stutter when plugged into a HDTV, but it’s still more than watchable.
There are some downsides to the Asus Eee PC 1201N, mind. The keyboard’s not the best we’ve ever used on a netbook, unfortunately, and Asus still persists with its touch typist angering habit of shrinking the right shift key. But the island keys are firm enough, and won’t let you down like the wobbly boards on MSI’s X Slim machines.
The Asus Eee PC 1201N is also incredibly hot. And we mean Beyonce trapped in pizza oven on the edge of a volcano hot. Perch this lappy on your legs for a while and you’ll start feeling some serious heat from all the work going on under the bonnet. It’s not painful, but with something thinner than jeans we suspect it might be so don’t get too many ideas about using the Eee PC 1201N in bed in your jammies.
Still though, for 400 notes, Asus has managed to conjure up a fantastic compromise between portability and productivity. The Asus Eee PC 1201N is big enough to get some proper work done on the move, and still enjoy video without squinting on the train home. Just don’t burn yourself!
