Anyone review Asus 1005HA?

ericinboston · #1 (**permalink**) 07-20-2009, 01:34 AM

Just wondering...it's selling well on Amazon but was looking for a formal review on this site...I know it's only been a few days since the release but really hoping a review by the 25th of July.

Thanks!

-Eric

Chris · #2 (**permalink**) 07-20-2009, 05:01 AM

Hey Eric,

I've been in contact with Asus and I'm hoping they will ship me out both the Asus Eee PC 1005HA and the Asus Eee PC T91 July 24th - that's when my contact is back from vacation.

So needless to say I'm slowly getting more and more netbooks to review the larger the site becomes

ThisIsNot · #3 (**permalink**) 07-20-2009, 12:12 PM

I can give you my brief review on the 1005HA (which was my netbook of choice until I purchased the AMD Gateway netbook). Just my thought on its different aspects:

Touchpad - the touchpad is nice. It is compatible with multi-touch input and gestures. It also blends in quite nicely to the netbook's body. You can use it blindly due to it being textured. I am not a fan of the buttons but I liked using the touchpad. I still prefer to plug in a USB mouse though.
The display is bright and crisp. However, I feel that it uses a resolution that is too low. 1024X600 might be fine for generic use but I always had to constantly scroll down when viewing websites, e-mails, and Word documents. I would have preferred a 1366X768 resolution.
The ports are all easily accessible, they aren't hidden behind access panels. The full sized VGA port allows the 1005HA to push a high resolution to external monitors.
The 1005HA's chassis is really nice. It is slim (1" thick) and the 6-cell battery is almost hidden in the design. I didn't know that the 6-cell version was sitting in front of me until I flipped it over and examined the bottom. The only bad thing about the design is that the hard drive is not easily accessible. The RAM can be upgraded in a few minutes (just like with the Eee PC 1000HE) but the hard drive requires some skill to get at. The chassis is a fingerprint magnet though. It doesn't matter what color you get, they all pretty much attract fingerprints.
The 1005HA also packs some generic hardware. The N280 processor and GMA 950 gpu are common in the netbook community. The same goes with the 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive. The 1.3 MP webcam produces high quality images. The nice thing about the generic hardware, along with the 6-cell battery, is that I was easily able to get 9 hours of real world operation. This was with the backlight set to 60% brightness, bluetooth turned off, and wi-fi turned on. I could get over 9.5 hours if the brightness was set to 40%. Turning the wi-fi off increased the battery time even further. I was able to get over 10.5 hours of usage with the backlight set to 40%, wi-fi turned off, bluetooth turned off, and with Asus' software set to its battery saving setting.
I recommend this netbook for anyone who is looking for a unit that can last all day without recharging so long as they can get over the generic hardware (which is fine for everyday use).