The new ASUS Eee PC S101H fails to be more attractive than it’s near rivals, the Eee PC S101 and 1002HA but if you just consider it for what it is, it is a very nice, very quiet, expensive looking netbook that is good at everything it does and is relatively light. It becomes less attractive when you consider that it is more expensive than it’s near rivals, $100+ vs the 1002HA and around $70 for the S101. Battery life is subpar for a 10-inch netbook.
What a difference a better keyboard makes. On paper the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE ($399) is nearly identical to its predecessor, the 1000H. It has the same attractive, high-gloss chassis, the same 10-inch, LED-backlit display, and the same 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive. However, the revamped keyboard, which finally puts the right Shift key where it belongs, makes a world of difference in terms of usability for touch typists. Plus, the 1000HE lasts over 7 hours on a charge and has a slightly faster processor than competing mini-notebooks. This is a very good netbook for an attractive price.
I’m excited. Are you?
Written by Ade Magnaye on February 11th, 2009. 3 Comments »
Filed under Reviews.
The new Intel Atom N280 processor with the GN40 chipset is now available. That means we’ll be seeing the new processor on newer netbooks in the future.
The new CPU has a top clock speed of 1.66GHz, which makes it a tiny bit faster than the Intel Atom N270 CPU which tops out at 1.6GHz. But the real news is that the GN40 chipset is designed to add better support for 720p HD videos than you get with the current Intel 945GSE chipset thanks to a hardware based video decoder.
This is bad. Liliputing replorts that Windows 7 for netbooks won’t be as functional as we hoped it would be:
Windows 7 Starter edition kind of sucks. Sure, you get the new Windows 7 taskbar and Home Group features. But you can only run up to 3 applications at a time. Sure, it’s tough to see more than 3 windows at a time on a 1024 x 600 pixel netbook display, but if you want to run Skype, Windows Media Player and your web browser all at once, you can’t launch an image viewer, IM application, or anything else at the same time.
So netbooks are as good as 4-year old iBook G4s, eh? Who would’ve thought?
Basically, the test involved pitting an iBook G4 and a MacBook Air against an Advent 4211, which is a rebranded MSi Wind U100. In several benchmarking tests, the Advent 4211 outperformed the iBook G4, although it didn’t come close to touching the MacBook Air. In real world tests, the results were more mixed. The netbook booted OS X more quickly than the iBook, and launched programs faster. But when it came to CPU intensive tasks like unzipping files or applying complex image filters in GIMP, the iBook took the lead.
The new Asus 1000HE has a higher capacity battery (7-9.5 hours), and has the new chicklet-style keyboard that everyone’s excited about (especially touch-typists).
Written by Ade Magnaye on February 4th, 2009. 1 Comment »
Filed under News.
Slashgear was able to successfully run Windows 7 on an Amtek U560 UMPC. It uses an intel A100 processor running at just 600MHz; it also only has 512MB of RAM. Let’s see how it works:
And it does! So if the Amtek U560, which has more or less the basic hardware specs of the Eee PC 701 can run Windows 7, what’s stopping us from doing the same to our beloved netbooks?
Written by Ade Magnaye on February 3rd, 2009. 2 Comments »
Filed under News.
SuperTalent is offering new SSDs for the Eee PC S101. The flash memory is embedded on a mini-PCIe board and can be had in three different capacities: 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB. Super Talent says that regardless of the capacity, each module offers maximum read and write speeds of 90MBps and 55MBps, respectively.
