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New slim design ; clever concealed ports and connections ; thin LED screen. Asus reinvents its classic Netbook with the slim, enticing Asus Eee Computer 1008HA, a bold experiment that mostly works.

While the internal parts will be familiar, the new Eee Computer 1008HA ( also known called the Seashell ) represents a radical design change from the boxy Eee Computers we have seen before, with a slim, chiseled design that makes it one of the best-looking Netbooks we’ve come across. The VGA output uses a dongle, the Ethernet jack is angled to fit into the thin body, there is a custom-molded ( nonremovable ) battery, and an LED display shaves some millimeters off the lid.

One unavoidable current Netbook trend is reducing prices. With a completely serviceable $299 10-inch system coming from Dell and funded Netbooks from mobile telephone corporations, this standard of $399 for a nicely supplied minilaptop starts to appear like the maximum the market can stand. At $429, the 1008HA slips just over the line, though the difference is more psychological than practical.

Using Intel’s N280 Atom CPU, the system was minimally quicker in our iTunes encoding test than Netbooks with the marginally slower N270 version of the ever-present Atom.

Performance in other tests was in accordance with other Netbooks, and overall we haven’t begun to meet an Atom-powered Netbook that massively outperformed or underperformed the pack. The basic guideline is that for basic jobs like world processing, Web surfing, and email, an Atom Netbook is more than satisfactory, so long as you keep your expectancies modest.