While most blogs go berserk (hello CTIA and HTC EVO 4G!) and write about upcoming Androids (which isn’t bad at all), we’ll take just a little bit of time today to bust a new review out the door. A prime showcase is the ASUS Eee PC 1201N. Complete with a dual-core Atom CPU, 12.1-inch panel, Windows 7 Home Premium, 2GB of RAM, and an island-style keyboard, there’s a lot to love here, especially the light weight. Full review after the “read more” link.
Price as Reviewed: $499 (the newer 1201PN which has the Ion 2 chip should bring this down. Hopefully.)
Full disclosure: This review unit was sent in by ASUS for review.
It Looks and Feels…Light (a good thing)
Jumping right out of the gate, the 1201N has a 12.1-inch LED screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768; perfect for a netbook of its size, which has graphics powered by an Nvidia Ion. The 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU is not single core, like much of its rivals, but dual-core, making the boundaries of netbook and real laptop even smaller than ever before. The overall build quality is not as good as it should be (or could), but moving the entire black plastic structure aside, the 1201N looks quite good for a netbook. Although this review unit came along with its fair share of scratches which vary from quaint to major, the black glossy black coating is extremely fingerprint happy. So always make sure to have a cleaning cloth handy.
The 1.2 inches thick and 3.2 pounds chassis of the 1201N means that you’ll be able to move around almost anywhere. For this month-long test, instead of bringing along my normal laptop I’d just snatch the 1201N, take it around and pop it open when a special sensor in my brain told me I needed to make a new post pronto and there was surely some Wi-Fi around here. The 1201N is a perfect travel companion.
Power, Screen, and Performance (in the same boat)
Let’s not get hasty here, the 1201N isn’t meant to Photoshop (or Paint.net) like the way I told it to and it threw up on me by crashing. 2GB of DDR2 RAM isn’t going to cut through things like this as if they where butter, but it does pull through admirably (even though that means 30-45 seconds to re-size a 10 megapixel image). The Ion graphics chip and the 12.1-inch panel provide just the amount of image clarity you’d want and expect from a solid monitor, except I would have preferred if it was slightly brighter in sunlight due to glare.
Watching YouTube videos in 480p was no doubt very appealing, but switch it to HD and things went slightly wonky. It might have something to do with my Wi-Fi, but as for that I think it’s pretty sound. When rendering the frames they came out nice and clear, but keeping them in motion like a film they were not. So let’s not blame the Eee PC here, but some strange YouTube HD issue in Google Chrome. As for Hulu HD, playback was nice and sharp, without any stuttering at all.
From a blogging performance/web browsing standpoint, the 1201N can occasionally lag. See, when we bloggers blog on a couple of different posts at once, we have at least 7 tabs running in Google Chrome, then maybe 4 more in Firefox 3.6 (or at least I do anyway). That translates to extreme Google-searching, photo uploading, image resizing and downloading heavy PR images, and brutal torture of using Twitter, with extensions on and being active in both browsers.
Putting a dual-core Atom through this might not be fair, but it pretty much put up with my constant abuse, with an occasional lag here and there. So for the average consumer, this $500 ultraportable can cut through anything you might throw at it. Although there’s that category of geeks called gamers, and they have very little space to do that on the 1201N. You could probably squeeze out some games at low-res/low-quality, but that’s not any fun at all, right?
Keyboard, Trackpad, and Ports
There is nothing that pleases your fingers more like the sound and feel of a “island-style” chicklet keyboard. The 1201N places the keys in just the right places, with the perfect about of feedback and cushion, but I usually find myself hitting the left key rather than the down directional key when I need it, which causes me to actually look down at the keyboard for a few seconds. Not very self-fulfilling if you think you’re the fastest typist in the whole family. But who cares? I do.
The mouse/trackpad/touchpad has very small bullet points to add a tactile feel, which is greatly needed because there are no other indicators to tell you where your finger is (besides the stickers on the right). This tiny trackpad also comes with multitouch, which is a thumbs up at LaptopMemo wherever pinch-and-zoom can be found. (You hear that manufacturers? We like and want multitouch in everything). Strangely though I made very little use of it on the 1201N. Maybe it was from my multitouch fatigue from reviewing the Nexus One, or maybe I just didn’t see a use for it in what I was doing?. Anyways, it works well, and that’s what is important.
Now let’s pick up the pace and browse by the ports here, no? On your right sir there’s a SD card slot, 2 USB 2.0 ports, audio jack, microphone jack, Ethernet, and lock slot.
On the left sir, you have a VGA port, power jack, another USB 2.0, and HDMI. Wonderful work here ASUS, you didn’t fail in port variety at all, except you left out an E-SATA port! You forgot about fast data transfer users, ASUS.
Battery Life
I don’t know about you sir/miss, but I prefer that I charge my review units on a regular daily basis, without being prompted to do so by losing my entire charge. I have never completely emptied a charge on the 1201N, and instead went down to 20%. Maybe I didn’t test the battery correctly, but I do know that my setting it to High Performance or “Super Performance” as according to the sometimes annoying Eee PC bundled software, I was able to multitask for:
2 hours (plus) by running web browsers constantly over Wi-Fi.
The battery life? Meh. It should have lasted longer on a netbook, but there’s only so much you can ask for in a nearly perfect little laptop (not).
Final Verdict:
The ASUS 1201N can’t really find its place in line. It’s a netbook technically, but looks and feels like a real ultraportable. It performs like a netbook in some places, and performs like an ultraportable (slightly better) in others. It’s hard to categorize this thing! All in all, if you’re in the market for a netbook or backup computer and have 500 bucks, the 1201N is sitting there and smiling, gleefully in its little shiny box thinking of your hard-earned cash (which would be well worth it).
Pros:
- Good selection of ports
- Applaud for the performance!
- Lightweight, good looking
- Apple-style keyboard
- Built-in Skype support from the start
- The price
Cons:
- It can get a little toasty on your lap
- Annoying default screensaver with elevator music
- All-plastic construction
- Dust and fingerprint magnet
[Thanks, Gary at ASUS!]
