Features & Specifications
Specifications for the Asus Eee 1002HA include Windows XP Home, SD card reader, 1GB of RAM, 160GB HDD, a 10-inch LCD with a resolution of 1024 x 600 and the CPU is an Intel Atom N270. The 1002HA weighs 2.6 pounds and is 1-inch thick. Rather than plastic like the majority of the Asus systems, the Asus Eee 1002HA is covered in brushed aluminum.

Asus also offers owners of the 1002HA 10GB of online storage and offers the Super Hybrid Engine that allows users to tune the system to save power or offer highest performance. The battery is a 2-cell unit with 4200mAh of power and the little machine has 802.11n Wi-Fi along with Bluetooth.

In Use
The Asus Eee 1002HA is certainly the best looking netbook in the Eee line and one of the best looking netbooks that anyone makes. The little rig is covered with gray brushed aluminum on the top of the lid and that same material carries over in to the palm rest area of the machine.

The 10-inch LCD is bright and has a matte finish that reduces glare compared to glossy displays. On the bezel of the LCD is an integrated webcam. The system has a nice keyboard in many respects with nicely sized keys offering good spacing and nice typing feel. The one location that the keyboard falls short is the weird location of the right shift key.

The right shift key is located on the far right side of the keyboard with the up arrow key between it and its normal location next to the question mark key. A blank is inserted between the question mark key and the up arrow key. That means that anyone used to typing on a normal keyboard will end up spamming the spacer or hitting the up arrow key until they get used to the odd layout. I can understand the need to save space on a netbook keyboard, but other machines in the class manage to put the shift keys in the correct location with even less space to work with.

The machine itself is comfortable to work on and the 10-inch screen is easy enough on the eyes for extended use. The small screen may leave some users wanting bigger icons and larger text, but the majority of people with average eyesight will be fine on the 10-inch screen.

The track pad on the Asus Eee 1002HA is a stroke of brilliance. Not only can you control the mouse cursor with your finger like any other notebook, but the track pad supports gestures and multiple touch as well. You can do a pinch motion to zoom in on images for instance. A single finger controls the cursor and two fingers controls scroll direction. Tap three fingers on the track pad and it acts like a right click. You can do anything on the computer without having to resort to the normal track pad buttons located under the track pad (where they should be). When you do need to use the buttons on the track pad they offer just right resistance and work well.

As you can imagine with any netbook performance isn’t going to beat even a low-end notebook or desktop computer these days. I have long wondered if someone like me could work with a netbook as their only laptop. All I really need a notebook to do is check email, surf the Internet, resize and crop images and write Word documents. The Asus Eee 1002HA does all of those things as easily as my desktop or normal laptop does.

Sure if you get into heavy-duty Photoshop use you will quickly find the limits of the Asus Eee 1002HA. However, if photo editing for you revolves around resizing images, cropping them and running the integrated enhancement tools in Photoshop the Asus Eee 1002HA is definitely up to the task. I could easily and gladly use the Asus Eee 1002HA as my only notebook and never miss my normal notebook.

The small 2-cell battery that Asus ships with the 1002HA seems small at first glance, but offers good runtime. Using MobileMark 2007's reader benchmark gave a battery run time of 243 minutes (roughly 4 hours). That time was achieved with the LCD set to full brightness, Wi-Fi on and the Super Hybrid Engine set to auto mode for adjusting performance.

The little netbook scored 1494 on PCMark05, significantly behind most full notebooks, but not bad when you consider the petite dimensions of the machine. I also ran Cinebench 10 on the Asus Eee 1002HA and its Intel Atom N270 turned in a score of 843. Again, the performance of the 1002HA is not a match for a full notebook, but a decent performance for the size and price point.

At the end of the day, your average computer user could easily move to the Asus Eee 1002HA and never look back. The performance hit you get going to the small netbook form factor will be more than offset for most users by the significantly smaller footprint and lower cost compared to full notebooks.