Asus’ latest addition to the well known EeePC series is the very good looking 1000HE. Asus claims that it has a 9.5 hour is battery life which is perfect for that long plane flight or tiring car trip.
Above: EeePC 1000HE
It doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive so film-watchers will be dissapointed, but it does have a 160GB hard drive (plus 10GB online storage provided by Asus) with Windows XP preloaded so you could load a few movies onto the hard drive. I’m not sure that the inbuilt graphics card would cope with very high quality films but it should be able to cope with a fair quality film.
It also comes with a 1.67GHz processor which is quite enough for word processing and document handling in Windows XP, plus the fair sized keyboard will make typing much less of a chore on such a small device.
It also has 1GB RAM preloaded, so you might even be able to do a little bit of multitasking on it.
The screen size is thereabouts 10″ so it’s not great unless you have good eyes, but most people should find it just-about usable – and any user of the previous EeePC’s should have no problem.
I was unable to find any information about the actual screen resolution, but I would guess it was either 1024×600 or 1024×480 judging by previous models of the EeePC.
The product itself has a 1 year warranty, but the battery warranty is only 6 months – so you may have to replace the battery ever so often to keep that 9.5 hour claim up.
Generally, it looks like a nice piece of kit for any regular traveller. I won’t use one myself because I love my 13.3″ dual core laptop which is fine for my travels, and I don’t think I could live without a DVD writer (or even player) built in as I watch a lot of DVD’s on my laptop.
It’s price tag is about 300$ in the US, which means it should be around £230 in the UK.
What do you think of it? Take a look at the Asus promotion page at http://promos.asus.com/US/1000HE/ASUS/index.html
I see what you mean – for anyone who already has an Eee it would be relatively pointless to upgrade now.
Although, I have to say – in my case anyway – a 9.5 hour battery would be perfect. Although 6.5 hours is still plenty!!
Anyway, I’ll have a look at the Aspire and maybe do a quick comparison!
Hope there is a Linux version as there is nothing worse these days than buying a machine with no applications installed. With Linux you get them all, I just can’t imagine spending the same amount again just to get a wordprocessor.
I have to say I have been using my Eeepc 1000 for six months now, and there is nothing in this release notice that offers anything to upgrade for. I get 6.5 hrs battery life already.
Good to know about it though. I think the 10″ Acer Aspire one with built in 3G support looks more interesting.
Nick