The good: Bigger 11-inch, high-resolution screen; overclockable CPU; great battery life.

The bad: Slightly slower, more expensive than standard Netbooks.

The bottom line: Swelling the ranks of 11.6-inch Netbooks, the Asus Eee PC 1101HA impresses with its design and battery. But having to overclock a slower version of Intel's Atom CPU is a dodgy workaround.

Read full review of the Asus Eee PC 1101HA »

By Dan Ackerman, CNET.com
Aug 25, 2009

Asus is perhaps best known for virtually creating the Netbook phenomenon with its line of inexpensive Eee PCs. The company has subsequently done a good job of refining and expanding on the Netbook experience, with systems such as the slim Eee PC 1005HA and the touchscreen Eee PC T91.

The latest move is to add an 11.6-inch display which, while not currently a threat to popular 10-inch models, still shows a lot of promise for Netbooks becoming ever more useful to mainstream laptop users.

Asus' take on an 11.6-inch Netbook retains the slim, attractive styling of the 10-inch 1005HA, and wisely upgrades the screen to a higher-resolution 1,366 x 768 model. Like the first 11-inch Netbook we checked out, the Acer Aspire One 751, it uses the Z520 version of Intel's Atom processor, instead of the more common (and faster) N270 and N280 CPUs.

In the Acer version, that made the system feel just sluggish enough that we were occasionally tempted to throw it out of a window. In a concession to reality, Asus allows for some overclocking of the CPU (up to 30 percent via the system's BIOS), which brings the performance up to standard Netbook levels. Still, it's an inelegant workaround and makes us eager to check out 11-inch systems due later this year with more powerful CPUs from Intel and AMD.

Design

The design of the 1101HA will seem familiar to anyone who has seen the 10-inch 1005HA version of the Eee PC (one of our favorite Netbooks). There's a tapered front lip and a gentle slope to the system, making it slightly thicker in the rear. There's still enough room for standard VGA and Ethernet jacks on the sides, but just barely.

Thanks to the slim design and efficient use of space, the 1101HA doesn't feel much bulkier than a 10-inch Netbook, which makes it worth a look if 10-inch screens are just too small but you still value portability and weight above all else.

The slightly bigger footprint allows for a more traditional keyboard layout, with flat-topped keys that widen slightly at the base. Only the right Shift keys seem to be unnaturally small. Lacking quick-launch or media control buttons (except for a touchpad on/off switch), many of the keys have alternate Fn key functions, the most notable of which is the space bar which also controls the system's power presets. In the 1101HA, Asus' Super Hybrid Engine power software allows you to overclock the Atom Z520 CPU, which gave us better performance (which is important because the Z-series Atoms are typically slower than their N-series cousins). The amount of overclocking is adjustable in the system BIOS, from 5 percent to 30 percent.

Features

The touchpad is perfectly usable, but the texture on it--made up of tiny raised bumps--isn't everyone's favorite, although it gives good tactile feedback as you move across the touchpad surface. The single rocker bar that acts as the left and right mouse buttons feels thin and unsubstantial. We prefer separate, and slightly larger, buttons.

The 11.6-inch LED-backlit display offers a 1,366 x 768 native resolution, which is the new standard for both 11-inch Netbooks and a handful of more expensive 10-inch systems (such as the Sony Vaio W). The slightly larger display, coupled with the higher resolution, makes the onscreen experience less claustrophobic, and better suited for navigating larger Web pages or long office docs. It's hard to go back to the lower 1,280 x 600 resolution of most Netbooks after spending much time with an 11-inch model.

The 1101HA offers a fairly standard set of ports and connections, including 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, making for a fairly complete package. If you want built-in mobile broadband hardware, you'll have to look to systems such as the Dell Mini 10.

Tags: Netbook, 1101HA, SD Card, Intel Corp., ASUS

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