Tuesday, December 09, 2008

New HP mini 1000 and Asus S101

The first generation of the 7 inch (display) EeePC 701 looks like a toy for me, but carrying a light weight "toy" around and giving you the ability to access to the Internet easily, is still better than your 2 to 3 kg notebook or the overpriced UMPC (Ultra mobile personal computer).

Recently more notebook vendors started to release 10 inch netbook products, most notable are the Asus EeePC S101 and latest HP mini 1000 netbook. 10 inch notebook is the ideal size for me to carry around, both notebook look attractive for me.

HP mini 1000
Tanaka Chie and HP mini 1000.
Originally uploaded by Andytn

Compare HP mini 1000 and Asus S101, both using Intel Atom N270 cpu (which is commonly found on most netbook, like Acer Aspire One), has a bigger keypad (92% of full size keyboard), so is easier to type compare to most netbook available in the market. HP mini has only 2 USB compare with S101 has 3 USB (USB is important for netbook). HP mini using HD, and S101 use SSD, but I believe this storage can be changed as an option in the future. Pricing wise HP should be cheaper.

I have not seen these 2 products available on the market yet, may be will check out on this coming PC Fair. Asus S101 has been launched in Asia for more than 2 months time, but I have not found any Asus dealers are selling this product. I think Asus should improve their support and distribution in Malaysia. HP has a much better local support.

I am a great fan of Asus EeePC, because they are the first to launch a small, light weight and cheap (USD299) netbook. Most importantly they choose Linux for their low cost netbook. Even though cost is the main concern that Asus use Linux for their EeePC netbook, it need a lot of courage for a company to choose Linux as the operating system. Xandros has done a good job to customize a Linux version for Asus EeePC.

With all latest release of EeePC runs on Windows, the only reason left for me to buy EeePC is just the battery life or the Asus brand name.

The specification of S101 and HP mini 1000.

The down side for HP mini 1000
- 2 USB port only
- glossy display
- slow HD or SSD access
- fan always on

Link:
HP mini 1000 vs EeePC 1000H

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