Asus’ upgraded Eee PC netbooks sport Intel’s new Atom N450 processor for over ten hours battery life, plus the quick loading ‘Splashtop’ pre-boot Linux OS.
Asus needs to add another ‘e’ into its Eee PC brand – to stand for ‘
extremely long battery life’.
The Taiwanese tech tiger’s new Eee PC 1005PE netbook, which is essentially an upgrade to the 1005 Seashell series but built on Intel’s new Atom ‘Pinetrail’ platform, clocks past the ten hour mark before users need to hunt for a handy AC socket.
Indeed, an advance review by
Laptop magazine reports that the 1005PE “lasts over 10.5 hours on a charge”.
“There’s good battery life, and then there’s leave-the-power-brick-at-home battery life” says Laptop’s Michael Prospero.
However, as expected the Pinetrail platform – a combo of Intel’s Atom N450 ‘Pineview’ processor and NM10 Express Chipset – doesn’t deliver any noticeable performance boost over the previous generation’s N270 or N280 chips, with the exception of the integrated graphics’ ability to handle smooth playback of 720p HD video.
But 10+ hours of battery life? You can’t argue with that!
Asus is the first netbook vendor to drop the N450 into its lineup, but plenty more are expected to join the parade at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
In an effort to help differentiate its Pinetrail-class netbooks from the pack, Asus is also baking into these the same ‘instant on’ Linux OS as found on its full-sized notebooks.
Called ExpressGate, this is a customised version of the Splashtop preboot OS which lets uses bypass relatively lengthy Windows startup times and quickly boot into a Linux environment. The 1005PE features a dedicated ExpressGate button to launch the OS and comes with a Web browser, Skype, an instant messaging client and photo manager.