Asus Eee PC 1000H Netbook

The overall aesthetic of the Eee PC 1000H is clean, simple, and works very well. With the black shell and shiny outsides, it actually looks slightly bigger than it is in real-life, and the unit is amazingly easy to fit into small bags or storage areas in cars.  It is quite portable, but yet, pretty rugged too. However, given the unit's 2.5" standard hard disk, we wouldn't consider it to be quite as rugged as the Eee PC models with solid state hard disks, which have no moving parts. Regardless, it's a notebook hard drive so it's no more sensitive to shock and vibration than any other standard notebook.  Also, the Eee PC 1000H is shiny -- very shiny. Perhaps a bit too shiny.

Shiny Top Cover w/ Eee Logo

Matte Black Bottom

While Asus has improved the look of their Eee PC's by toning down the logos and keeping things simple, the company still suffers from OEM-itis, where we see a load of stickers on the bottom of the keyboard. Removing these stickers typically leaves the unit somewhat sticky, and it's always just an eyesore to look at. Especially Asus's huge sticker on the bottom right with their technical support number. That seems like something which could have easily gone on the bottom of the unit out of day to day view. We do, however, like the unit's four clean, small, integrated LED status lights for power, battery, data access, and wireless connectivity.

The Keyboard. Nearly Full-Size!

The customizable hot keys are the only really unique things we see when we open up the notebook. The keyboard is impressively spaced considering this is a netbook, and is close enough to the size of a full-sized keyboard that it makes typing quite easy to pick up on. The one compromise we wish they wouldn't have made with the keyboard is the mis-placement of the right side shift key to the right of the direction arrows, which is commonly used. Without this right side shift key placed in its proper place, we have to rely on our left finger to find the shift key, this is not a common movement, therefore, it slows down typing by a significant margin, almost to the point where it frustrated us.  It's a shame, too, since every other layout option on the keyboard seemed to work quite well.

Customizable Hot-Keys

LED Array

The unit's trackpad is square in the center of the model, and it supports two button controls via some nice brushed aluminum buttons.  You do not have any scrolling abilities with this trackpad, which can become time consuming if you're a heavy user of scrollbars. The trackpad feels a little dull and flat, but is accurate and responsive after a few minutes of use.