Extending the Battery Life
One of the biggest features to accompany the Asus Eee PC 1000HE is its impressive 9.5 hours of battery life. Well, I should say that figure is the claimed battery life and as with all other claimed battery life ratings, we should take this figure with a big bucket of salt. Naturally, regular use will not get you anywhere near this number.
So, how does the Eee stack up under real world conditions? In my highly unscientific and uncontrolled experiment, I found that I was able to get between six and seven hours of computing before the Eee decided to shut itself down.
During those six or seven hours, I didn’t really do anything that was too power-intensive, nor did I allow the netbook to idle for too long of a period at a time.
In general, I was doing some mild web surfing, watching a few clips on YouTube, and a streamed some video for a short time over Ustream. The brightness was set at 50% and I allowed the Super Hybrid Engine to be in automatic mode. There are battery saver and high performance modes as well, so you can imagine the kinds of effects that these would have on how long the Eee lasts between charges.
Conclusion
It’s quite clear that the netbook market is here to stay and the manufacturers will constantly be improving on their products to better compete against one another. Trying to make a buck selling netbooks is arguably more difficult than doing the same with regular notebooks, because you have to be much more conscious of the selling price.
The Asus Eee PC 1000HE hits quite a few sweet spots. The 10.1-inch display is just the right size (but the resolution could be better). The included battery offers plenty of life. The 160GB hard drive and 10GB Eee Online Storage will give you plenty of space too. And it all comes in at under $400.
If you’re in the market for a reasonably robust and powerful netbook and you don’t want to break the bank doing it, the 1000HE could quite easily fit the bill. That is, until Asus one-ups itself again.
The Good
- LED backlit display
- Great chiclet keyboard and trackpad
- Lots of battery life
- Excellent build quality
The Bad
- Screen resolution is too low
- Multi-touch trackpad can be a little finicky
- Minimal bundled accessories