As you can see from the results of our usual SCC-oriented Gimp test, the 1000 performs better than the 901 at all speed settings, suggesting it's benefited from a Bios tweak. That doesn't appear to have overly harmed the 1000's battery performance. It scored less well than the 901 did, but since it's still well ahead of rival SCCs, that's less of problem than you might at first think.
Gimp Results
Time in seconds
Shorter bars are better
Asus' move to equip Atom-based Eees with a 6600mAh battery made a big difference to the desirability of the series against rival offerings. The 901 and 1000 deliver the best out-of-the-box battery experience, though will see how upcoming SCCs from Samsung, Toshiba and others challenge that.
Battery Life Results
Time in minutes
Longer bars are better
If battery life is your key consideration, your choice of SCC is really between the Eee 901 and the 1000. If it's the best keyboard that you need, you'll have to look elsewhere. In the round, though, the Eee line remains our pick of the SCC crop, and the 901 still holds our Editor's Choice award.
The 1000 doesn't take it because we've yet to be convinced of the value of a 10in screen and, more to the point, this is one pricey netbook. The 1000 will set you back around £369, rather more than rebranded Winds, like the Medion Akoya Mini and the Advent 4211 - and that's with the Windows tax taken into account too.
Verdict
The Eee PC 1000 has a better keyboard than the 901, but so does the Aspire one, the MSI Wind and most other netbooks. The Wind also has a 10in screen, but it feels more compact than the 1000. Only 802.11n and Bluetooth separate it from the herd, and how truly necessary are they, especially when you're paying extra for them? Ditto the 40GB SSD.
No, if you want an Eee go for the 901, which is smaller and offers the same (market leading) battery life. If you must have a 10in SCC with plenty of storage, the Wind's the one.
Asus Eee PC 1000 10in Linux netbook
COMMENTS
Said it before
"Some buyers may prefer the familiarity of Windows, especially if they need to run specific apps or hardware that lacks Linux support, but there can't be many of those."
AutoCAD & Paint.NET (amongst others) don't run on Linux (and Wine & Gimp are not valid arguments).
XP tax comes in at about £20 on these machines after the shakedown. Which is decent enough value as far as I'm concerned. Faffery and hacking around in Linux would come to much more than £20 worth of my time.
Shame the XP machine only comes with a HDD rather than an SSD. Shame also that MS won't be honest and just flog XP off the shelf at £20. Then I could buy a desirably specced Linux SCC and install my favoured OS.
Show us the source, ASUS
By not providing source for software which is distributed under licences such as the GPL, they're breaking the licence conditions and, as a result, they do not have permission to distribute the binaries.
Oops.
Deja vu
Looks remarkably like the 2003-vintage G3 iBook I've got in a box somewhere in the spare room.
ASUS and opensource
They haven't really got it yet.
Their repositories are out of date, even if you do make it to a command line, you won't be updating to the latest patch.
They see opensource as being free in that they have to put zero effort in, and if they are going to do that they should at least install a community distro on it. Then they could just setup a mirror, problem solved. But, instead they go for a commercial linux, modify and have stale repositories.
There are lots of GUI package managers around, and I think they have bundled one, somewhere.
ASUS could have had a lot of fun with opensource, had they been just a little bit visionary. Most of the buyers prefer to stick with what comes with a machine, irrational perhaps, but that seems to be a trait, with that type of install base they could have given some of the distros a run for their money, instead they just sort of gave up.
Ubuntu netbook seems to have filled the gap for a few, but there a lot of EEEs out there, running unpatched I would imagine.
I was going to ask about the price in the UK
Until I looked in the Dutch shops and saw that it's gone up by 50 euros since it was first released...
I got my 1000H for 399 euros (just over 300 quid). At that price point it was perfect - I checked in the shop against the 901 and the Acer One and it was the nicest to use.
I have to say I don't have the issue with the keyboard flex that others have pointed out - it fits the bill perfectly for what I need from a sub-notebook. Whilst the screen resolution isn't a gain over the 901, the keyboard is a *huge* gain, and I don't have stubby fat fingers (I can type just fine on the 701 that my wife has) it's just *nicer* :)
