Otaku Gadgets

You have got to hand it to Asus when it comes to Netbooks – they practically invented the whole segment. Lately though, they have started to fall behind in the race and are being taken over by competition (mostly Acer with their Aspire One series). Asus has been fighting back though and their latest addition to the Eee PC series has been a revised version of the 1008HA model.

The Eee PC 1008HA had everything going for it. With the tapered edges and sleek looks, it was a visually pleasing departure from the previous Eee PC designs. But the pricing was where Asus went wrong, terribly wrong. The $429 price tag was just too much for a netbook. People are more used to netbooks that are priced around $300. A price tag of around $430 is quite the premium for a netbook. Asus has since learnt from its mistakes, revised the 1008HA and released the Eee PC 1005HA netbook.

With this model, the design remains the same with the sleek looks and tapered edges that remind you of seashells. The flaps that use to cover the ports on the older model have been don away with. The model has received a battery upgrade with a new 6-cell battery and currently has one of the longest battery lives in the netbook market. The space saving features such as the angled ports have been left out as well. These changes have together contributed to a slightly thicker and heavier netbook. The change that is the most welcome without a doubt is the new sub $400 price. At $389 it is that much more affordable for the buyer. However, it has to be kept in mind that there are a lot of decent netbooks in the market that are just around $300.

The keyboard is wide and flat, making it one of the more comfortable netbook keyboards to type on. There is a button above the keyboard for disabling the touchpad, which is necessary for when you are using an external USB mouse with your netbook. However, this could’ve easily been done by adding an option within the OS whereby the touchpad would be automatically disabled when an external USB mouse was detected. Nevertheless, it is a handy feature to have.

Asus also has a proprietary launch menu that sits at the top of the screen. It provides handy system shortcuts and shortcuts for launching the media player. It must be noted here that netbooks are used mostly by people who prefer no nonsense features. The netbooks are already short on resources, so adding a menu like this is not a good idea.

The native resolution of the screen is 1024×600 and the backlit LED display conserves some power. The 1008HA had a non-removable battery and yet it gave a shorter battery life than the 1005HA. The 1005HA will likely last about 7-8 hours on average usage. C-net reports that the netbooks survived for up to 6 hours and 51 minutes on their battery drain test with video playback. So the official 9 hours rating might be closer to the real life longevity than official ratings usually are.

Asus also includes a bevy of power saving features available as presets to further extend the battery life. These tweaks can easily be done manually but having them together and easily accessible will save you time and effort. The 1005HA has the usual set of connectivity features that the average netbook features but with 3 USB 2.0 ports instead of the usual 2. An Expresscard slot is missing here and it can be found in some of the other high-end netbooks in the market. Some people are likely to miss the angled Ethernet port found in the 1008HA. It was quite an intelligent design. Other than those two areas, there is no reason to gripe about the connectivity. In fact, there are also stereo speakers in the 1005HA in addition to the usual headphone and mic-in ports. That is not a very common thing in netbooks because the need to save space is very high on the priority list.

The 1005HA is powered by an Atom processor like almost every other netbook in the market right now. The Atom N280 model that powers the 1005HA gives out performance stats that are similar to the other netbooks that use Atom processors. The onboard Intel GMA 9500 chip handles the graphics. Currently, the choice between netbooks is not performance oriented at all because you will get the same kind of performance from all of them. Instead, you must differentiate between the various features and the price brackets.

The place where the 1005HA really shines in the battery life, as mentioned before. Getting this netbook would be a good idea for those of you who are away from a charging point for long stretches of time.

The standard netbooks in the market are all capable of doing the same things and their limitations are also the same. You can do the basic tasks like checking your email, surf the web and do some word processing. But do not expect to be multi-tasking with all of them or having hundreds of tabs open at the same time on the browser. That will make things painfully slow for you.

When it comes to storage, Asus does away with smaller SSD solutions and includes a full-fledged 160GB HDD. Which is probably a major contributor to the price cut. And let’s face it – people are not looking for blazing fast speed when they are buying netbooks. So the more features you can offer them at a lower price the better.

At the end of this, it must be noted here that Asus probably has another winner here. Although it may still be considered a bit pricey, it still has the right set of features to attract buyers. With 3 USB 2.0 ports and one card reader the expandability should be enough for a standard netbook user. The long battery life is likely to be a good selling point and then it will be the design. It is available in Black and blue variations.

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