Along with the opportunity to dribble over cars costing more than our houses, this morning's Asus Lamborghini launch also gave us the chance to play with the Taiwanese company's latest Eee PC netbook – the Eee PC Seashell 1101HA.
This 11.6-inch machine features copycat styling that mimics the ultra-suave and skinny Eee PC Seashell 1008HA, but offering a slightly larger screen, keyboard and user interface. The bigger screen also offers a higher resolution, at 1366 x 768 pixels, promising to make this an ideal tool for browsing the web.
Unlike the Eee PC Seashell 1008HA, the battery on the 1101HA is removable, making it easy to upgrade in future or swap should you need longer battery life. The downside of this is a slightly chunkier chassis – although it's still thinner than many of its rivals.
The components within the Seashell 1101HA are standard netbook fare – with an Intel Atom processor (albeit one running at 1.33GHz, rather than the more regular 1.6GHz), 1024MB of memory and a 160GB hard drive.
Usability is better than most, with a large and comfortable keyboard. It could be slightly firmer – rattling under use – but it's responsive and large enough to type at speed. The touchpad is also big and comfortable, featuring gesture support than makes zooming slightly easier.
Features include 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, three USB ports and a VGA-out port for hooking up external displays. There's also an integrated memory card reader, and a webcam neatly integrated into the top of the display.
We'll be getting one in for a full review in the next week, so check back here for more info. Available from early July, prices for the Eee PC Seashell 1101HA start at £379 (inc. VAT).
Via What Laptop
Your comments (1) Click to add a new comment
raj_shekar
August 23rd
1. ASUS has definitely stepped it up a notch. The stylings have been compared (pretty fairly) to the MacBook Air's shape, with a curved, thinned, and lightened chassis that's just an inch in thickness at its largest point. It's got a high gloss finish that makes it pretty smudge-prone, but also really slick-looking. The slimming ASUS has done has practical value, too: the 1008HA is extremely comfortable to hold and carry about in one hand -- whether open or closed -- and though, at 2.4 pounds
ASUS hasn't spared any expense on little details, either: they've hidden the ports behind teeny doors, so that the Seashell presents a smooth, uninterrupted exterior.
When you open it up, the 1008HA continues to be fairly impressive, with a super-comfortable keyboard that's about 92 percent of a full-sizer. The keys have a nice tactile response and some users will no doubt rejoice when they spot an Eee PC first: a full-sized right-shift key. The trackpad is dimpled and has some two-fingered zoom in and out gestures that function as advertised, but that we didn't find to be particularly useful to us.
The Seashell boasts pretty standard netbook specs -- 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and Intel GMA 950 graphics. Its processor 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280 is slightly better than the N270 crammed into most, and to that end, the 1008HA does, in our experience, boot about 20 seconds. It has just two USB ports, a standard headphone jack, and mini VGA port (which seems to have been chosen over VGA for aesthetic reasons only), all hidden behind those tiny flaps. To accommodate the lack of VGA port, there's a mini VGA to VGA adapter included in the box, and a dedicated magnetic slot to house it on the bottom side of the chassis, a unique solution to what could potentially be an annoying situation, though ultimately we'd still prefer a full VGA port., the Seashell boasts 802.11 B/G/N Wi-Fi, 10/100Mbps Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, and a high-density, non-removable, lithium polymer battery that supposedly gets up to 6 hours of life -- but more on that in a moment.
Add to that the excellent trackpad, sweet keyboard, and slightly pumped battery life, and you have a pretty nice package here. The Seashell -- which is obviously aimed at a demographic seeking a higher-end netbook
Ultimately, ASUS has moved the netbook category forward a step; the Seashell is not a cookie cutter portable -- even with its somewhat run of the mill specs
Alert a moderator
Tell us what you think
You need to Log in or register to post comments