Asus Eee PC 1101HA Seashell

Photo gallery: Asus Eee PC 1101HA Seashell

Asus is perhaps best known for virtually creating the netbook phenomenon with its line of inexpensive Eee PCs. The company has subsequently done a good job of refining and expanding on the netbook experience, with systems such as the slim Eee PC 1005HA and the touchscreen Eee PC T91.

The latest move is to add an 11.6-inch display, which, while not currently a threat to popular 10-inch models, still shows a lot of promise for netbooks becoming ever more useful to mainstream laptop users.

Asus' take on an 11.6-inch netbook retains the slim, attractive styling of the 10-inch 1005HA, and wisely upgrades the screen to a higher-resolution 1366x768 model. It uses the Z520 version of Intel's Atom processor, instead of the more common (and faster) N270 and N280 CPUs.

With past systems that CPU made the system feel just sluggish enough that we were occasionally tempted to throw it out of a window. In a concession to reality, Asus allows for some overclocking of the CPU (up to 30 per cent via the system's BIOS), which brings the performance up to standard netbook levels. Still, it's an inelegant workaround, and makes us eager to check out 11-inch systems due later this year with more powerful CPUs from Intel and AMD.

The design of the 1101HA will seem familiar to anyone who has seen the 10-inch 1005HA version of the Eee PC (one of our favourite netbooks). There's a tapered front lip, and a gentle slope to the system, making it slightly thicker in the rear. There's still enough room for standard VGA and Ethernet jacks on the sides, but just barely.

The slightly bigger footprint allows for a more traditional keyboard layout, with flat-topped keys that widen slightly at the base. Only the right Shift keys seem to be unnaturally small. Lacking quick-launch or media control buttons (except for a touch pad on/off switch), many of the keys have alternate Fn key functions, the most notable of which is the space bar, which also controls the system's power presets. In the 1101HA, Asus' Super Hybrid Engine power software allows you to overclock the Atom Z520 CPU, which gave us better performance (which is important because the Z-series Atoms are typically slower than their N-series cousins). The amount of overclocking is adjustable in the system BIOS, from 5 to 30 per cent.

The touch pad is perfectly usable, but the texture on it — made up of tiny raised bumps — isn't everyone's favourite, although it gives good tactile feedback as you move across the touch-pad surface. The single rocker bar that acts as the left and right mouse buttons feels thin and unsubstantial. We prefer separate, and slightly larger, buttons.

The 11.6-inch LED display offers a 1366x768 native resolution, which is the new standard for both 11-inch netbooks and a handful of more expensive 10-inch systems (such as the Sony Vaio W). The slightly larger display, coupled with the higher resolution, makes the on-screen experience less claustrophobic, and better suited for navigating larger web pages or long office docs. It's hard to go back to the lower 1024x600 resolution of most netbooks after spending much time with an 11-inch model.

The 1101HA offers a fairly standard set of ports and connections, including 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, making for a fairly complete package. If you want built-in mobile broadband hardware, you'll have to look elsewhere.

While most netbooks have Intel's N270 (or N280) Atom CPUs, both 11-inch netbooks we've tested so far use the 1.3GHz Z520 version. Generally, the Z-series runs cooler and was intended for handheld mobile internet devices. In netbook use, it can be noticeably slower than the N-series Atoms, and that's unfortunate because any additional performance hurdles are especially annoying for netbooks, which are already fairly pokey under the best of circumstances. In the Eee PC 1101HA specifically, performance was slower than netbooks with the Atom N270 and N280 in most of our benchmarks — although it was actually very fast in our iTunes encoding test.

The mitigating factor in the 1101HA's case is the built-in overclocking, turned on by switching between presets in the included power management software. With overclocking turned on, we saw benchmark scores that were more in line with typical netbooks. Obviously, overclocking your CPU will have an impact on battery life, and generate more heat, although we didn't run into any stability issues while using the system. You can also underclock the CPU way down to 1.0GHz to improve power consumption, but we can't imagine being able to do anything useful in Windows XP like that.

Asus has always had some of the longest-lived netbooks, and the 1101HA ran for an astonishing eight hours and 50 minutes in our video playback battery drain test (with the CPU running at its standard speed). That's great for all-day computing and gives you plenty of headroom for running the overclocking software, watching videos or other high-power tasks.

Asus covers its laptops with a standard one-year parts-and-labour warranty, and it offers online web-based help and a toll-free phone number. The company's support website includes easy-to-find driver downloads and FAQs.

System configurations:

Asus Eee PC 1101HA
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 256MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 500; 160GB Hitachi 5400rpm

Acer Aspire One 751h-1545
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 64MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 500; 160GB Seagate 5400rpm

HP Mini 5101
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz; 224MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Seagate 7200rpm

Dell Inspiron Mini 10
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 256MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Western Digital 5400rpm

Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 128MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Western Digital 5400rpm