ASUS EPC1000HA-BLK026X PC Notebook

Sorry for the repost, but after doing some editing the review got stuck in "draft" limbo...so I'm deleting and reposting as a workaround.

After Steve Sinofsky's presentation of Windows 7 running on a netbook at PDC '08, I got an ASUS Eee PC 1000HA to evaluate at work. I considered the ASUS 1000HA, ASUS 901, MSI Wind U100, and Lenovo S10 as options based on features and availability.

I ruled out the ASUS 901 as having too little storage (12GB for the WinXP model, 20GB for the Linux model). The Lenovo is incredibly good looking, but with only a 3-cell battery it didn't have the long battery life I'm looking for.

So MSI Wind vs. ASUS 1000HA. I picked the ASUS for 3 reasons: 1) available from the distributor immediately, 2) impressively bright/white LCD panel, and 3) slightly less annoying keyboard layout.

Spec-wise, this is a pretty standard netbook: 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB memory, 120GB harddrive. It ran the pre-installed WinXP and Works package fine. More interestingly, I flattened the machine (completely erased and repartitioned the harddrive...no going back!) and installed the Windows 7 beta. The machine is very responsive and runs my applications just fine. The biggest tax I've noticed is that the drive (probably a 4200rpm to save power) is a bit slow and impacts application startup time. Once the apps are running, basic daily tasks (email, word processing, spreadsheets, browser) are fine and I have no issue with running multiple apps at once and switching rapidly between them.

I have been delighted by the size and weight of the netbook (my normal notebook is a 17" monster). Slightly bigger than 8.9" netbooks, the keyboard is comfortably sized for typing and the trackpad is responsive and accurate. The trackpad even has some driver-level multi-touch features such as using two fingers to signify scrolling and pinching for zoom. However, the multi-touch only goes as far as what is hookable as a mouse driver (scroll wheel, tilt, etc.) and doesn't implement full contextual multi-touch. Still, it's a nice florish.

One problem with the trackpad is that the keys are annoying stiff. They're aesthetically pleasing: a narrow metal bezel sweeps down each side of the trackpad and widens at the bottom to form a left and right button. Looks great, but I suspect also the source of the stiffness. Luckily I usually use taps on the trackpad surface for left-click rather than the button, so I only run into this on right-click operations.

The display is backlight by LED and is much brighter than my normal laptop and even one of my desktop LCD panels. I'm very impressed with the image quality. Where I've had to adjust is the smaller resolution. The display is 1024x600, which is much smaller than my laptop and desktop displays. It has not been an issue for most browsing tasks and word processing. It does mean a lot more scrolling in spreadsheets and there are some monsters that I will not be using on this netbook. However, the one that bothers me the most is email. I like to run Outlook with the preview pane open and that keeps things pretty cramped. It'd be fine if I wasn't addicted to the preview pane.

Battery life
With a 6-cell battery, ASUS claims 6 to 7 hours are possible. I haven't had the patience to run a rigorous battery life test, but I do know that a single charge will get me through a day of meetings. Bear in mind that does not mean 8 hours of straight use. If I'm going to spend the entire meeting buried in my laptop, then I might as well skip the meeting. So my usage pattern for a day of meetings is just sporadic notetaking and occasionally glancing at email. A single charge will get me through a day of that (note that I set a "power saver" config in the Control Panel and dimmed that super-bright display somewhat).

Biggest annoyance
My biggest annoyance is just with the placement of one key on the keyboard. To keep the inverted "T" arrangement of the arrow keys, the small right shift key is placed to the right of the "up" arrow key. Normally the right shift is immediately to the right of the slash/question mark key and is double-wide. This interfers with my touch typing, but I'm starting to come back up to speed.

The MSI Wind has a good right shift key, but even more annoyingly they moved the Fn key to where the Ctrl key is on most keyboards. Well, at least I found that more annoying...your individual tastes may differ as to which is the lesser evil.

I note that most netbooks seem to use the same keyboard as ASUS. However, there are some notable exceptions beyond the MSI. The HP MiniNote and Acer Aspire One both seem to have better keyboards and I would consider them now (at the time, Acer availability was low and the HP's were still Celeron rather than Atom based).

Bottom line
So bottom line is that the netbook is working out well for me. I plan to use it most of the time for meetings, only pulling out the big laptop for those special occasions (like around performance review time). At this price, why not?