Hands-On: Asus Eee PC 1008HA, UX50, and U80V

New laptops, netbooks...and hints of a competitor to iTunes? Asus has a lot up its sleeve these days, but let's start with the netbook that some folks in the press circles are comparing to a MacBook: the Eee PC 1008HA.

It's thin, sleek, and light. I had a chance to play with one, and I'll tell you one thing: Asus may be spitting out more revisions of its netbook line than I can count, but at least its designers are continuing to look at ways to refine the machine. The proof is in this new $420 netbook.
Though I couldn't steal the 1008HA away from its PR handlers to lock away in our labs, I did get a few minutes for a quick test-drive. So consider this a hands-on teaser of what's in store for when the unit ships.

Under its frosty exterior, the system sports current netbook innards: an Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1GB RAM, a 160GB hard drive, Bluetooth, 802.11n, and a three-cell battery (just don't ask me about the battery life yet).

The 92-percent full-size keyboard is big and comfortable, with a good layout. The buttons felt firm and large enough to type up a quick story. Even the metallic mouse-button bar was reasonably secure. That said, I'm a little concerned about the touchpad. On the device that I tried, I found little indication between where the touch area ends and where the wrist rest begins. But the spokesperson on hand assured me that the final unit will have bigger grooves so that users can feel their way around without having to eyeball the strike zone.

To accommodate its thin-and-light design, the creators of the 1008HA dropped a few ports--and made an interesting design move in the process. In a hidden compartment on the netbook's bottom sits a VGA adapter dongle. When you need it, you simply pop it out and plug it into the mini-USB port on one side of the machine. It's a pretty smart move that keeps the functionality while cutting down the size, and it minimizes the chance of losing dongles. (I also have to give props to Sony's VAIO P netbook, which sneaks the VGA dongle onto its power supply...but I digress.) Otherwise, on the 1008HA you'll find hiding behind flaps the usual retinue--an ethernet hookup, two USB ports, an SD Card reader, and headphone and microphone jacks.
One last thing that I need to mention is the sneak peek I had at the software that Asus plans to bring to its future machines. My contact at the company let me smuggle out these pictures, though he isn't certain whether the 1008HA will actually ship with the software. Here's hoping that it will.

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