David Flynn01 April 2009, 3:45 PM
By adding an optical drive to its fresh-baked 1004DN, Asus further blurs the line between netbooks and notebooks.
It’s getting harder to draw a clear difference between netbooks and notebooks. The traditional gaps in price and screen size have been narrowing, while the shift from SDD to hard drives and the introduction of ‘advanced’ features such as ExpressCard slots removes a few more of the netbook’s tell-tale traits.
Of course, you could always fall back on the fact that netbooks don’t include an optical drive – until today, that is. Asus’ Eee PC 1004DN, available from the end of this month, is the first netbook to sport an inbuilt CD/DVD drive.
CD/DVD drive, ExpressCard slot, fingerprint scanner and almost six hours' battery life... are you sure this is a netbook?
It still holds true to the netbook’s tendency towards being thinner and lighter than comparable laptops, with a tapered waistline averaging 3cm and tipping the scales at 1.45kg.
Despite the inbuilt optical drive, the 1004DN keeps the slim lines for which many netbooks are well known
Asus is also keeping battery life in the happy zone, with the standard
six cell 5200 mAh slab rated for “up to 5.9 hours” – which experience
tells us means a solid 4.5 hours with Wi-Fi.
The 1004DN is also the first netbook to adopt Intel’s second-gen ‘Menlow’ netbook architecture. Well, okay, it’s more of a 1.5 gen refresh.
The revamped platform partners the Atom N280 processor with Intel’s new GN40 graphics chipset. The former is marginally faster than the N270 – 1.67GHz over 1.6GHz, with a 667MHz front size bus (up from 533MHz) – but the best win is that the power ceiling drops from 2.5 watts to an even 2.0 watts. So there’s not much in the way of extra performance, but potentially a little less heat and a little more battery life over an N270 netbook.
It’s the GN40 that should put some more pep in the netbook’s step. This replaces the ‘just good enough’ 945GSE silicon which has been the N270’s mate until now. The GN40 is a pared-down version of the notebook-class GL40, which in turn uses Intel's GMA X4500HD graphics to deliver hardware-based 720p HD decoding.
On the outside, the 1004DN looks most similar to the 1002HA. However, from the 1000HE it inherits the delightful chiclet-style keyboard and Super Hybrid Engine power management utility, while adding an ExpressCard slot to supplement the trio of USB 2.0 ports, so you can slide in a 3G modem card and still have three USB ports free for whatever else.
Road warriors will welcome the ability to drop a 3G modem into the ExpressCard slot and keep the USB ports spare
The rest of the spec is pretty standard fare for the Eee PC 1000 series – a 10 inch screen, 160GB hard drive (plus an extra 10GB of Asus-hosted online storage), 1.3 megapixel webcam, Bluetooth and 802.11n wireless, a slick design and brushed aluminium cladding available in black or champagne gold.
That’s a pretty compelling package for any ultra-portable, so it should come as no surprise that the 1004DN also moves into notebook territory with its gulp-inducing $1,399 price tag...