Netbook showdown: The top 10 mini laptops rated

By Derek Chesterfield on 30 October 2009, 12:48pm

12Pages

1
...
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

Asus Eee PC 1000HE £300

The Eee PC 1000HE is basically a souped-up version of the 1000H. The extra 'E' in the name stands for 'extended', a reference to the claimed 9.5-hour battery life. This netbook also uses a 1.66GHz Atom N280 CPU for a little extra processing grunt.

Design and usability

With its glossy finish and gently curved edges, the 1000HE certainly looks attractive. Flip it open and the first thing you'll notice is the redesigned keyboard. It has isolated keys that have a significant amount of space between them. That helps make the machine faster and more comfortable to type on. The trackpad is also larger than those found on most netbooks and supports multi-touch gestures.

Connectivity

The 1000HE puts in a decent showing in terms of connectivity. Along with the usual Ethernet and VGA connections, you get three USB ports plus an SD card reader for quickly transferring pictures to the netbook from your camera's memory card. The 1000HE also includes Wi-Fi connectivity, but it's disappointing that there's no Bluetooth support -- this feature is now pretty standard across most higher-end models.

Performance and battery life

The 1000HE was one of the first netbooks to use Intel's Atom N280 CPU, which has a faster front-side bus and higher clock speed than the Atom N270. The 1000HE doesn't deliver a massive performance improvement over previous Eee PCs, but that's not too much of a criticism, as previous models were quite nippy anyway. Like almost all current netbooks, it has 1GB of RAM and runs Windows XP. It certainly feels fairly fast in terms of day-to-day usage. It also performs well on the battery-life front, managing to keep running for an impressive 5 hours and 48 minutes in Batter Eater's Classic test. This is hardly surprising, given that it uses a high-capacity, 8,700mAh battery.

Should I buy it?

If you're a frequent traveller, the 1000HE is a great buy, since it not only offers long battery life and a comfortable keyboard, but it's also small enough to carry around easily.

Read our full Asus Eee PC 1000HE review