Asus Eee PC 1005HA-H

We were very fond of the previous version of Asus' Eee PC, the 1008HA, which represented a radical design change from the boxy Eee PCs of the past. But its high-end (for a netbook) price, at AU$899, slipped just over the line for many, and its non-removable battery wasn't as long-lasting as we've seen in other Eee PCs.

The latest revision, called the 1005HA-H, keeps the slim, tapered design but ditches the somewhat cumbersome cover flaps on the ports and adds a more traditional six-cell battery. This means a slightly thicker and heavier system, but also one that's our current netbook battery life leader. Add in a shaved price tag at AU$799, and you have what may be our new go-to netbook choice.

The design of the 1005HA-H is based on the (slightly slimmer) 1008HA model. There's a tapered front lip, but the new model lacks some of the space-saving features of the 1008HA, such as the angled Ethernet jack and hidden mini-VGA port. Rather than a potentially smaller SSD drive, there's a standard 160GB HDD inside, augmented by a free 10GB online data storage subscription for 18 months, for backing up files to a remote server.

While slightly thicker and heavier than other recent netbooks, it's still a vast improvement over the first few generations of mini laptops, which had a universally boxy, toy-like feel. Our review unit was glossy black, which was prone to picking up fingerprints; blue is also available.

The flat, wide keyboard, similar to what we saw on the Eee PC 1008HA, is among the better netbook keyboards we've used, and the full-size right Shift key is one of those things you don't realise is very important until it goes missing. The touch pad is demarcated by a rectangle of raised dots on the wrist rest, and works well, although we found ourselves going into the touch pad settings and jacking up the default pointer speed.

A single quick-access button above the keyboard is for disabling the touch pad (handy if you're using an external USB mouse), and Asus' different preset power profiles are accessible by hitting the Fn key plus the space bar. New to this model is a software suite that acts as a software dock popping out of the top of the screen (by default, but switchable). From there, you can access functions such as screen brightness presets and media players. Most netbook users we talk to are no-nonsense types who just want to surf the web or send email, so learning the ins and outs of a proprietary menu bar system may not be high in the list of priorities.

The 10.1-inch LED display offers a 1024x600 native resolution, which is standard for a netbook, although higher-end systems are starting to add 1366x768 display options. The backlit LED allows the lid to be very thin, and also use less power than a more traditional LCD display.

The 1005HA-H offers a fairly standard set of ports and connections, lacking only the ExpressCard slot we've seen on some high-end netbooks. We prefer to have our connections out in the open, rather than hidden behind hinged plastic doors (as in the 1008HA model), although we have to admit, the 1008HA's tiny, angled Ethernet jack was an impressive engineering feat.

With Intel's N280 Atom CPU, the system was, not surprisingly, on par with other current netbooks, even those with the slightly slower N270 version of the ubiquitous Atom. We have yet to meet an Atom-powered netbook that vastly outperformed or underperformed the pack. The basic rule of thumb is that for basic tasks such as word processing, web surfing and email, an Atom netbook is more than adequate, as long as you keep your expectations modest.

The real star here is the system's battery life. Asus has always had some of the longest-lived netbooks, and the new 1005HA-H got an impressive six hours and 51 minutes in our video playback battery drain test — more than its cousin the Eee PC 1000HE, and more than two hours better than the non-removable battery in the 1008HA model.

Asus also includes its Super Hybrid Engine feature in the system, which is essentially a series of power-saving presets to further extend battery life. These are mostly power consumption tweaks one could perform individually, but it's handy to have them all in one place.

While we've reviewed the 1005HA-H here, there are actually two other models in the market — the 1005HA and 1005HA-M. Both feature an Atom N270 processor and a 0.3 megapixel webcam instead of the 1.3 found in the 1005HA-H, whereas the M's defining feature is Bluetooth 2.0+EDR support. The 1005HA retails for AU$599, the 1005HA-M for AU$699.