Asus Eee PC1005PE, Atom N450 Pinetrail Launch

Name: Asus Eee PC1005PE, Atom N450 Pinetrail Launch - Page 3
Brand: Asus

by Dave Altavilla and Marco Chiappetta — Monday, December 21, 2009, 12:01 AM EDT

Eee PC1005PE Design and Build Quality

Our Intel Atom N450 and Pinetrail platform test vehicle came housed in an all new Asus Eee PC 1005PE netbook, decked out with a sleek, glossy midnight blue paint job and very high quality fit and finish. This Eee PC is very similar from a mechanical design standpoint, to the Eee PC 1005HA we showed you here. The machine is built from heavy gauge plastic and with its standard 6-cell battery, weighs in at almost 3lbs (2.8 to be exact).

Side ports on the machine consist of three USB 2.0, one standard 10/100 Ethernet RJ45, headphone/line out, microphone input, SVGA output, an MMC/SD Flash Card reader and a Kensington lock port. Just about every option you'd need on a machine of this class is available, save for perhaps an Express Card slot, which quite frankly is asking a lot in this form-factor.

Multi-Touch, Multi-Gesture Trackpad Goodness and 14hr Battery Life? - We'll see about that...

The multi-touch trackpad on this Eee PC is absolutely fantastic, with excellent response and the ability to zoom in and out, fast page up/down, and left/right easy scroll. The zoom gesture was especially handy with the small 10.1" screen and 1024x600 resolution. We preferred browsing the web with an 85% zoom which afforded more screen real estate and was easily adjusted with a simple outward pinching motion.

The keyboard area of the Eee PC1005PE is still the cramped chiclet design we're use to seeing on netbooks in this size range. However, without question, if you can handle typing in these tight quarters, the Eee PC1005PE delivers a solid feel with good tactile response and key travel. The keyboard layout is a pretty standard 92% size with lots of function-mapped keys on the top row for toggling screen output, adjusting brightness, sound volume and the ability to turn off the WiFi radio as well as putting the netbook into sleep mode and wake up.

The 10.1" LCD on the Eee PC1005PE is a glossy type panel with excellent brightness, contrast and color reproduction. Occasional glare on the panel is fairly prominent, but not a huge distraction, and the LCD does perform well in daylight environments. The case and the panel itself however, are fingerprint magnets, so we'd suggest keeping a microfiber cloth nearby to make short work of quick cleanups, especially if you tend to be obsessive-compulsive about your computing, as we are around the HH Labs.