Cheapest ASUS Eee PC 1008HA Seashell 10.1-Inch Pearl Black Netbook - 6 Hour Battery Life

I love netbooks. They're miniature computers and they're surprisingly capable for being so inexpensive. With the 1008HA you're paying a bit more for style but it certainly delivers on being a nice and attractive piece of hardware. It's also delivers all the usual things you'd expect from a netbook. There's really no point in talking about specifications anymore because there is really no practical differences between any of them. I think the most important thing to discuss is how the manufacturer has used the space afforded to them and what other functionality they've either brought or neglected to bring to the table. In my opinion ASUS does a pretty good job with the 1008HA but with the assumption that you're going to use it EXACTLY how they intended.

I'm going to gloss over a few things before diving deep. They keyboard is pretty great. I find the arrow keys a bit weird because they tried to make them bigger in an awkward way, but that aside it's a great keyboard. The HP Mini 1000 is really the only keyboard I like more, though I would say there are others comparable to this one. Though I do miss the chiclet style ASUS had been using in previous Eee PCs, this keyboard is much easier to type on. They've also made some improvements to the trackpad and one weird change. Though it's easier to click, the tracking area is a bit strange because you only know you're on it based on little raised bumps. There's no border and so you can glide off of it and sometimes not really realize it. On the plus side, although you'll find it extremely awkward and maybe even uncomfortable at first, you get used to the strange little bumps and it's not so much a problem. One of the most bizarre oversights, in my opinion, is the use of multitouch. It is a multitouch trackpad and yet it has no two-finger scrolling. You pretty much only get the pinch gesture. I can't understand for the life of me how they omitted two finger scrolling, especially when it was present in previous iterations of their netbooks. For a netbook, the screen is nice (despite the gloss). The webcam is functional but nonetheless a crappy webcam. You have USB ports. You have WiFi. You have Ethernet. You have a VGA port (in a manner of speaking). Hooray. What you get is pretty standard. How it is implemented is more interesting.

It probably goes without saying that this unit is nice and thin. People have been calling it the MacBook Air of netbooks. I'd say it's like the Air and the iPhone had a kid that somehow ended up becoming a Windows PC, simply because this thing picks up finger prints like the glossiest of Apple devices. This is the most reflective computer I've ever owned. It's kind of annoying. I'm not a huge fan of gloss, but I like it in some instances. It's too much with the 1008HA. Perhaps it's better with the white version, but the black one is just going to look like a fingerprint collage after a week of use. Nonetheless, it's still one of the most attractive netbooks you can buy. But I was going to talk about how the ports are implemented and not about the fingerprints you'll put all over them. You pull out a little door (not as elegantly as the MacBook Air, but you're also not paying an exorbitant design tax either) to reveal ports. Cool. The neat parts really exist with the Ethernet and VGA ports. The Ethernet port is too big to fit in such a thin case so when you open the port up, it sort of drops down like a staircase embedded in an airplane. It's a smart use of the space. An even smarter use of the space is where you have the VGA port. There isn't one, exactly, because you have a proprietary connector where the VGA port would go. However, underneath the case you have the adapter stored inside. You just pop it out and plug it in. Within seconds, you have VGA. I thought this adapter would be hard to get back in the case but it's shockingly simple. It just snaps back in. Very impressive.

One other thing worth mentioning is that this has a 2.5" 5400 RPM hard drive. I don't know how they fit that in this tiny casing, but they did. One thing worth noting is that although the drive is 160GB you will turn on the machine for the first time and it'll appear to be 80GB. This is because ASUS did something I'm not sure I like. They partitioned the drive in two halves so you can use one partition to quickly recover your machine in the event of irreversible failure. They've even dedicated a function key to restore with the ease of saying "Beatlejuice beatlejuice beatlejuice" (you press the key three times). While I think this is sort of a clever feature, I also think it's not really worth sacrificing half the drive space for it. It's also a little disconcerting that ASUS assumes that failure is so inevitable and so they've built-in such a simple recovery to their machine. This lack of good faith seems to be more in Windows XP than their hardware, which is understandable because, you know, XP isn't exactly perfect but it's still just weird and rubs me the wrong way. Of course you can just clear out the partition and disable it or use the partition for dual booting if you're not a huge fan of XP like me.

So let's talk about your operating system options. You don't really have any, or at least without a bit of work. On a netbook we're talking about installing Linux, Windows 7 and maybe OS X. I haven't tried running Linux yet (although supposedly Ubuntu is not that hard to install) but you'll run into trouble with both Windows 7 and OS X. First of all, OS X actually runs pretty well but is difficult to install and WiFi (and maybe Ethernet...didn't check) doesn't work. So that's kind of a no-go. Apparently some folks are working on maybe changing this without installing a completely different WiFi card ([...]) but I haven't seen anything successful yet. Personally, I'm running Windows 7 RC1 and it mostly works fine but you have to do a few things to make that happen (turn on auto-login and run a little script at startup, basically). There are instructions all over the net and it's pretty easy. Sometimes the display goes dark and you have to hit the power/sleep button now and again to get things going but it's a minor annoyance and definitely preferable to running Windows XP, I think. Installing Windows 7 means you can't use the included Eee Storage application maybe some other minor features I neglected to notice, so if you're buying the machine for all the added software benefits that ASUS provides, then you're going to want to think about how important those are before wiping out XP.

The main issue I have with the machine is how difficult it is to upgrade. It's not that it's impossible, but they really don't make it a pleasant experience and with only 1GB of included RAM you pretty much are destined to want to upgrade that, at least. Including 2GB in these netbooks is so trivial and inexpensive that I can't understand why they don't just do it. It's the one thing most everyone wants to upgrade and it tends to make the most difference. Upgrading the 1008HA is painful. I mean that because to get to anything you have to take off the keyboard and because of how it is adhered it feels like you're ripping the computer apart when you do so. It's hard to believe you're not destroying the machine in the process. It's also not exactly the most obvious experience, either. If you want to go through it, there are guides online but if you haven't upgraded a computer in any sort of real way then this is probably not the best place to start.

Overall, I think it all comes down to one thing: if you want to use this machine as ASUS intended, it's a wonderful netbook all-around. If you want to change anything, prepare to be met with resistance. Because it's such a nice piece of hardware the lack of upgrades and OS choices (without drawbacks) are a little saddening. Overall, though, if you're looking for a good netbook that's both tiny, light and attractive you really can't go wrong with the 1008HA.Get more detail about ASUS Eee PC 1008HA Seashell 10.1-Inch Pearl Black Netbook - 6 Hour Battery Life.