Today's best selling laptop on Amazon.com is Asus Eee PC 1000 HE netbook.After reading numerous reviews, I think Asus Eee PC 1000HE is the best netbook you can buy now. As Darren Gladstone, PC World said on Washingtonpost.com:“The streamlined and redesigned Asus Eee PC 1000HE takes no prisoners. While the previous Asus Eee PC 1000 offered a solid netbook, Acer's Aspire One stole all the attention with its lean and incredibly affordable approach. With the latest incarnation of the Eee PC 1000, the "HE" might as well stand for "Holy Enhancement!" “. The Eee PC 1000HE is the latest netbook refresh from ASUS that offers a revamped chicklet style keyboard and the new Intel Atom N280 processor. The exterior and interior look nearly identical to the 1000HA and 901, so if you liked the old style you will love this. The biggest change users will find on this new model is the extended 9.5 hour battery life, thanks to a battery 30% larger and improved power management.
The Eee PC 1000HE has a similar chassis to the 1000H. Both have the same black glossy lid and port placement. The 1000HE, however, has worked its glutes to get rid of the unseemly battery bulge found on its older brother’s backside. The system’s battery is now flush with the chassis, giving it a much slimmer profile. However, at 10.3 x 7.4 x 1.4 inches, the 1000HE is still chunky in comparison to other 10-inch netbooks but still a hair thinner than the older, clunkier Eee PC 1000 released last year. Build quality is very good with strong, durable plastics used throughout the body that help keep panels flex-free and the creaks to a minimum. The Asus Eee PC 1000HE laptop holds its own ground inside a backpack, even against other heavy objects competing for space (like other laptops or books). For the average user this means you won’t find oily key impressions on the screen after you wedge this Eee PC into a backpack full of books on your way to class. The first, most obvious thing you'll spot is the cut-out keyboard. Just like you'd find on an Apple MacBook Air or on Sony VAIO laptops, the keys poke through the plastic, creating a wide gap between buttons. In that respect, this feels and looks great, and is generally more usable. And because it uses an island layout, there is no flex to the panel which was the downfall of the Eee PC 1000H. Overall, the manufacturing quality on the 1000HE keyboard is just better. The placement of the keys has also been revamped. There were complains in all ASUS Eee PC reviews about the placement of the Shift key to the right of the up arrow. ASUS must have been listening to them as they have finally pulled the Shift key in to the left of the up arrow now. The new keyboard comes very close to tipping the scales against the HP Mini 1000 and 2140 but it would probably have to be a tie for best netbook keyboard.ASUS uses an Elantech touchpad on the Eee PC 1000HE for its multitouch capabilities, which works great if you want dual finger control, but not so great if you want fast response and sensitivity. I found that it had some lag during quick movement and didn’t have the nice high sensitivity of similar Synaptics models. One problem we noticed after a few hours of use was the touchpad surface slowly peeling up on one side like a loose sticker, but after pressing it back down it didn’t come up again. It may have just been a manufacturing flaw where it was not seated correctly during assembly. The touchpad buttons were large enough for easy triggering by the side of thumb and worked great if you hit them dead center or on the very edge. Feedback was minimal with a very shallow click when pressed. The trackpad is just spacious enough -- I particularly like its metal framing and the few multitouch functions incorporated into the design. However, we found the pad slightly twitchy to control. No deal-breaker, but noticeable.The display. The 10” LED-backlit display found on the Eee PC 1000HE is easy on the eyes and a real treat to view for hours on end. Whites are clear, colors are vibrant, and backlight levels are very bright and consistent. While many netbooks get the short end of the stick for some components such as processing power, they easily make up for it in screen quality. The panels found on most netbooks offer better viewing angles and brighter backlight levels than screen found on larger notebooks. Vertical viewing angles which tend to quickly invert colors on full-size notebooks stay accurate longer on the display found on the 1000HE. Horizontal angles are the same way, allowing the user to easily share a movie with a passenger on either side. To check the screens viewing angles see this links for front, side, upper and from below views. However, the highly polished bezel that keeps the screen in place can get a little distracting at times.
ASUS Eee PC 1000HE Specifications:
- Intel Atom N280 1.66GHz processor
- 160GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive (Seagate 5400.5)
- 1GB of DDR2 RAM (667MHz)
- Windows XP Home operating system with SP3
- 10” WSVGA LED-Backlit 1024 x 600 LCD
- Ports: 3 USB 2.0, 1 VGA monitor out, headphone jack, microphone input, SD card reader (SDHC compatible), Kensington lock slot, Ethernet 10/100
- Webcam (1.3 MP)
- Wireless: 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.0
- One-year warranty
- Size: 10.47” x 7.3” x 1.12-1.50”
- Weight: 3lbs 2.4oz, 3lbs 9.9oz travel
- Price: $399 ($374 with $25 preorder discount)
System performance was great for average use which includes browsing the web, typing up a document, or doing light work inside a photo editor such as GIMP. There is not much of an increase in performance over the older Asus Eee PC 1000HA, even though the Asus Eee PC 1000HE is technically faster with a higher clock speed and front side bus. In some benchmarks notebookreview.com saw results that decreased, especially with the newer Seagate 5400.5 hard drive. Access times ended up being 50% slower than the previous 5400.4 model, even though every other variable stayed the same including capacity.
HD video playback capabilities were roughly the same as previous Intel Atom netbooks, playing some lightly encoded 720p trailers with 40-50% CPU usage, and normal HD content like TV episodes at 60%+ while also dropping frames. The Intel N280 processor does support a newer GN40 chipset, but it does not appear to be included with this netbook. All of their testing software points to the standard Intel 945 chipset found in other Atom netbooks. For the sake of comparison, most of the netbooks that came out late last year used the N270 CPU, which runs at a lower frequency (1.6-GHz) and a slower frontside bus speed (533MHz as compared with 667 MHz in the N280). The laptopmag.com team run a comparison GeekBench benchmark versus the Eee PC 1000H. The Eee PC 1000H notched a score of 871 (888 for processor integer performance and 748 on processor floating point performance). The Eee PC 1000HE scored 38 points higher with a score of 909 (931 for processor integer performance and 780 on processor floating point performance).
Port selection is average compared to most netbooks, but less than what some new netbooks offer. ASUS doesn’t include an ExpressCard slot for external WWAN radios, like the Lenovo S10 or HP Mini 2140. The 1000HE offers three USB, LAN, headphone/mic jacks, a Kensington lock slot, and VGA. A SDHC 4-in-1 multi-card reader located on the side handles flash cards from digital cameras or storage expansion. You can check the front (activity lights), rear (battery), left (Kensington lock slot, LAN, 1 USB, Headphone/Mic) and right (SDHC 4-in-1 card reader, 2 USB, VGA, AC Power) views of ports placement.
Heat buildup and noise from the cooling system was minimal during battery powered use, as the system scales back the processor which then puts off less heat. While on AC power using high performance or super performance modes the system does warm up quite a bit, leaving the fans running constantly at a low speed. You can also check this link to see pictures with the external temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit that notebookreview.com team measured on test runs – front view and back view.
The 1000HE has a battery that is substantially larger than the one found in the old 1000HA that gave only 4 hours and 28 minutes run time. To move up towards the claim of nine and a half hours ASUS bumped the capacity from 49Wh to 63Wh and tweaked the power management software so the processor sipped even less juice. Both of these changes led to some very impressive real world results. With the screen brightness set to 60%, wireless active, and processor set to auto it stayed on for 7 hours and 36 minutes. If you are going for longest possible time, you can shut off the wireless cards, put it into power saving mode, and lower the brightness all the way and it gets an estimated 9 hours and 20 minutes of battery life.
The speakers are good enough to enjoy some music or a movie, but they are too small to produce any bass or midrange. At peak volume the 1000HE can fill up a smaller room with music to share with a couple of friends, but you might be fighting against background noise in a public setting. Headphones are a great option for private listening or if you want volume levels high enough to hurt your ears.
ASUS has built in a very convenient one key solution (F9) for recovery. The Eee PC 1000HE netbook does not have optical drivers to read the recovery CD (so do all other netbooks). So the function key is very useful when you need it.
Other notable features thrown into the mix: InterVideo WinDVD (which seems to be a little bit of overkill, I'd recommend you try out KMPlayer), and 18 months of 10GB of free online storage.
The Eee PC packaging comes with an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, AC adapter, and printed operating instructions. It's backed by a 1-year warranty on parts and labor.
I found a customer review with a heads up about the 802.11n for this netbook. The radio in the Asus Eee PC 1000HE will only see/connect to 802.11n on the 2.4 GHz spectrum. This is a let down because all the speed and range advantages of 802.11n is when you use the 5ghz spectrum not the 2.4ghz spectrum. making 802.11n more of a buzz word for this product, and not anything useful.
Bottom line ASUS made some good improvements to the Eee PC1000HE, most notably the newer keyboard. The keyboard is more comfortable to type on over the old style thanks to the new chiclet keyboard design and the improved spacing helps to reduce typing errors. The keyboard on the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE is what people have been hoping to see from the netbook leader for months now and gives it an edge in the now very crowded market. The design has few changes, with some areas gaining glossy paint over a matte finish before, but the average user might not tell the difference unless both were sitting next to each other. The newer Intel Atom processor with a faster clock speed and faster bus speed had little improvement over its predecessor and HD content is still unfeasible unless you are playing low bitrate videos. The battery life also improved by a wide margin, moving past seven hours under normal use, which is the greater than any netbooks on the market. Overall I would say ASUS has an impressive new netbook and a very affordable starting price. You can always find a better netbook down the road, like a dual core netbook with the same price (if not cheaper) by next year. But if you cannot wait for so long, Asus Eee PC 1000HE is surely one of the best solutions in the market.
