ASUS Eee PC 1008HA

With mini-notebook competition heating up, even ASUS — the company that practically invented the netbook — has to step up its game. While the internal components will be familiar, the new Eee PC 1008HA (also known as the Seashell) represents a radical design change from the boxy Eee PCs we've seen before, with a slim, tapered design that makes it one of the best-looking netbooks we've come across.

To get down to 2.57cm thick, some engineering sleight-of-hand was required. The VGA output uses a dongle, the Ethernet jack is angled to fit into the thin body, there's a custom-moulded (non-removable) battery, and an LED display shaves a few millimetres off the lid.

With Dell's entry-level Inspiron Mini 10v coming in at £199 (inc. VAT) and the advent of subsidised netbooks from mobile phone operators, the current standard of around £350 for a nicely equipped mini-notebook is starting to look like the maximum the market will bear. At £394.99 (inc. VAT, from Expansys), the 1008HA slips over the line, although the difference is more psychological than practical.

The slim design of the 1008HA is a close cousin of the HP Mini 1000, but it feels even thinner, thanks to a tapered front lip. Helping shave a little size from the system are space-saving features including a pin-size power adapter plug, an angled Ethernet jack and a mini-VGA port that requires a small dongle to use — cleverly hidden in the bottom of the chassis. Rather than a potentially smaller SSD drive, there's a standard 160GB hard disk inside, augmented by a free 10GB online data storage subscription for backing up files to a remote server.

We've seen the 1008HA in white, but our review unit was glossy black, which was prone to picking up fingerprints at an alarming rate.

The £394.99 (inc. VAT) ASUS Eee PC 100HA ('Seashell') comes in a range of colours, including white and black.

The flat, wide keyboard, similar to what we saw on the recent Eee PC 1000HE, is among the better netbook keyboards we've used, and the full-size right shift key is one of those things you don't realise is very important until it goes missing. The touchpad is demarcated by a rectangle of raised dots on the wrist rest and works well, although we found ourselves going into the touchpad settings and jacking up the default pointer speed. Above the keyboard are two quick-access buttons for turning off the Wi-Fi antenna and disabling the touchpad (handy if you're using an external USB mouse).

The 10.1in. screen offers a native resolution of 1,024 by 600 pixels, which is standard for a netbook. The LED-backlit panel allows the lid to be very thin, and also uses less power than a more traditional LCD screen. A system tray application offers some other settings (1,024 by 768, 800 by 600), but LCDs usually look best at their native resolution.

The 1008HA offers a fairly standard set of ports and connections, lacking only the ExpressCard slot we've seen on some high-end netbooks. But bear in mind that all the ports are hidden behind hinged plastic doors, so to even plug in a USB key, you'll have to flip open one of them. The tiny angled Ethernet jack is impressive — you should try plugging a cable in at least once to see how it works.

Using Intel's N280 Atom CPU, the system was minimally faster in our iTunes encoding test than netbooks with the slightly slower N270 version. Performance in other tests was in line with other netbooks, and overall we have yet to meet an Atom-powered netbook that vastly outperformed or underperformed the pack. The basic rule of thumb is that for basic tasks such as word processing, web surfing and email, an Atom-based netbook is more than adequate — as long as you keep your expectations modest.

Like the MacBook Air, the 1008HA has a non-removable battery — something that rubs some users the wrong way, but we've never been particularly troubled by such batteries. The benefit is that a larger battery can be custom-moulded to the chassis, instead of the standard three-cell battery typical of thinner netbooks. Alhtough it can't match the six-plus hours we've seen from netbooks with massive six-cell batteries, such as ASUS's own 1000HE, we got an impressive 4 hours and 1 minute from the 1008HA in our video playback battery drain test. ASUS also includes its Super Hybrid Engine feature in the system, which is essentially a series of power-saving presets to further extend battery life. These are mostly power consumption tweaks one could perform individually, but it's handy to have them all in one place.

ASUS covers its Eee notebooks with a two-year collect-and-return warranty, and offers online web-based help and phone support.

Specifications