Asus has now released the Eee Pc, the 1000HE netbook with a 10.2″ screen that can last up to 9.5 hours on a single charge.  Of course you can’t be running wifi or the camera to get your 1000HE netbook to last nearly 10 hours, but still, anyone flying long distances via plane or taking extended train and bus rides will appreciate being able to use their netbook for almost the entire journey.

Other significant improvements to the 1000 series Eee Pc includes a better keyboard layout by improving the placement of the shift key and better spacing out the keys.

Complete Features of the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE
-10 LED Backlight screen with ZBD
-Intel N280 CPU (1.66 GHz, FSB: 667MHz)
-170GB Storage (160GB HDD and 10GB Online Storage)
-8700mAH battery with up to 9.5 hours of run time
-802.11b/g/n
-Bluetooth
-1.3MP Camera
-92% Chiclet Keyboard
-Wide Multi-Touchpad

Time to buy a netbook?  I’d been seriously considering an ASUS Eee Pc for quite sometime now, but the biggest factor that kept me from making the leap is the lack of graphics, meaning running anything close to blueray would be next to impossible.

Consider waiting for the new NVIDIA Ion graphics chip set to release in the first half of this year.   Nvidia claims its one chipset paired with Intel’s Atom laptop chip delivers 10 times the speed of current Intel-only netbooks.  This means being able to run a bit more graphics intensive programs.