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Asus hits just about all of the marks in the Asus Eee PC 1005HA, the newest version of its classic Eee Computer , highlighted by a 6-hour-plus battery life. The most recent revision, called the 1005HA, keeps the slim, chiseled design but ditches the rather awkward cover flaps on the ports and adds a more normal six-cell battery.

Add in a little shaved ticket, down to a more reasonable $389 ( though some completely serviceable Netbooks are down to $299 ), and you have what could be our new go-to Netbook choice.

The look of the 1005HA is based on the ( a touch slimmer ) 1008HA model. There is an angled front lip, but the new model lacks some of the space-maximizing features of the 1008HA ,eg the angled Ethernet jack and concealed mini-VGA port. While slightly thicker and heavier than other latest Netbooks, it’s still a huge improvement over the initial few generations of mini computers, which had a universally boxy, toylike feel. Our review unit was glossy black, which was susceptible to picking up fingerprints ; blue is available.

The flat, wide keyboard, like what we saw on the Eee PC 1008HA, is among the better Netbook keyboards we’ve used, and the full-size right Shift key is one of those things you don’t understand is important till it is going missing. The touch pad is demarcated by a rectangle of raised dots on the wrist rest, and works very well, though we found ourselves going into the touch pad settings and jacking up the default pointer speed. A single quick-access button above the keyboard is for disabling the touch pad ( handy if you are using an external USB mouse ), and Asus’ different preset power profiles are accessible by hitting the FN key plus the space bar. New to this model is a software suite that acts as a software dock popping out of the apex of the screen ( by default, but switchable ).

From there, you can get access to functions like screen lightness presets and media players. The genuine star here is the system’s battery life. Asus has always had some of the longest-lived Netbooks, and the new 1005HA got a formidable 6 hours and 51 minutes in our video playback battery drain test–about 30 minutes more than our prior leader, the Eee Computer 1000HE, and more than 2 hours better than the nonremovable battery in the 1008HA model. Asus also includes its Super Half-breed Engine feature in the system, which is basically a series of power-saving presets to further extend battery life. These are typically energy usage tweaks one could perform individually, but it is handy to have them all in one place.