Editors' note: Anyone interested in the 1008HA reviewed here is advised to check out the Asus Eee PC 1005HA (released after this review was written). It offers a very similar design, but with a removable battery that lasts significantly longer than the 1008HA model.
With mini-laptop 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 about 25mm thick, some engineering slight-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.
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 to 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 HDD inside, augmented by a free 10GB online data storage subscription for 18 months 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 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 touch pad is demarcated by a rectangle of raised dots on the wrist rest and works well, although we found ourselves going into the touch pad 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 touch pad (handy if you're using an external USB mouse).
The 10.1-inch LED screen offers a 1024x600 native resolution, which is standard for a netbook. The backlit LED allows the lid to be very thin, and also uses less power than a more traditional LCD screen. A system tray app cycles through some other resolutions (1024x768, 800x600), but displays 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 of the ubiquitous Atom. 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 world processing, web surfing and email, an Atom 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 non-removable batteries. The benefit is that a larger battery can be custom-moulded to the chassis, instead of the standard three-cell battery typical in a thinner netbook. While it can't match the six-plus hours we've gotten from netbooks with massive six-cell batteries, we got an impressive four hours and one 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.
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Since when are LED displays backlit? LEDs are light emitters; having a backlight would surely just wash out the display? Also, having a backlight would ADD to the thickness of the display - not reduce it. I guess you meant "The non-backlit LED allows the lid to be very thin".