Asus Laptops
The Asus Eee has been the most popular netbook on the market for quite a while. The first thing that strikes you is that it is a very good looking piece of equipment, which can be a big factor for netbooks, considering their ultra portable nature. It also comes in under the $400 netbook price threshold, so good first impressions.
Second, is the fantastic battery time, coming in at between 10 and 11 hours, you should never have a problem being caught short and it weighs in at 2.81 pounds with the battery. There is also 160GB hard drive storage facility, giving you enough for a huge range on applications, music, movies or whatever you want. This is combined with bluetooth, Wi-Fi and the ATOM CPU from Intel, the N280, which offers a 667MHz FSB and is the fastest in its class.
These sort of stats are still being seen on some of the full size notebooks so to be able to get them in something as small as the ASUS 1005HA-P is really fantastic. However, the all important question, now that we have established it's technical credentials is it's useability.
It seems Asus have been able to set new standards there as well. It comes with an ergonomically designed keyboard, which is 92% of the size of a full size one. We found we could type over long periods without feeling the strain and tiredness so familiar with other netbooks. There is also a wide-format multi-touch touchpad which meant we could scroll around the screen without a mouse.
The 10.1 inch display uses a new technology LED which we found we could use to read the screen in any light conditions and we could also see a standard web page without scrolling left or right. To sum up, it's currently an exciting time for netbooks and the Asus Eee is certainly at the forefront of that and at the right price.
