Asus already have several netbooks on the market but the first that we managed to get our hands on was this EeePC 901.

Its big brother, the EeePC 901H comes with an internal hard drive, but the 901 uses flash memory instead--12 GB of it to be precise.

Windows XP is installed by default (although you can of course change the operating system later), and this netbook follows the trend set by others and features an Intel Atom processor.

Handling & Connecitivity
According to the specification, then, the case is supposed to be red, but to our eyes, pink would be a better description. 

Around the edges and behind the screen, there's a rather pixellated pink and white snowflake pattern to 'decorate' the case, giving Asus' new laptop a rather feminine look.

On the 901, the keyboard takes up most of the space available to it, giving decent-sized keys that are all around 1.5 cm across.

Typical webcam shot

Although a few system keys down the right hand edge are a little smaller, but this is far from irritating.

If the keys are big on top, they're not very deep, however, and you need to type gently to avoid thumping the ends of your fingers.

The touchpad underneath the keyboard is bigger than average, and is surrounded by a brushed metal trim--a better idea than the chrome found elsewhere which easily picks up grimy fingerprints.

Right at the edge of the laptop, the relatively stiff left and right click buttons are flush with the edge of the case.

In general, the webcam is decent, with a sharp image which only sometimes tends to be dominated by red.

Its other major fault is a flicker which is most noticeable in low light.

As for the sound, it's absolutely fine with little distortion, although we did sound a lot more nasal on some of our recordings than we are used to.

You get three USB ports, an Ethernet port, an incredibly slow built-in memory card reader and a VGA output.  Pleasingly, a Bluetooth chip is on board, which is still something of a rarity amongst netbooks.

Mini jacks for mic and headphones	Memory card reader
RJ45 and first USB	Two more USB and VGA

We were equally pleasantly surprised by the good quality of the integrated speakers.

To really enjoy music and hear bass notes, you'll need to plug in some headphones, but the speakers provided are perfectly good for watching a film.

Processor Power
This is a very fast computer, and it boots up in 35 seconds, which is more than 20 seconds than the eCAFE or the Medion E1210, both of which rely on traditional hard drives.

Software runs very quickly, thanks to the high read speeds of the flash memory inside the 901.

Writing to the flash memory, however, is an entirely different story and is incredibly slow: copying a 2.6 GB folder of music and photos from an external hard drive onto the computer over USB took over twenty minutes, but copying the same folder back (reading from, rather than writing to the flash memory) only took 2 minutes 19 seconds.

Battery Life & Portability
The 901 comes with a very chunky battery, which allows you to watch video for up five hours with the screen's brightness set to 100 cd/m².

This is a new record in terms of netbooks, and streets ahead of anything else we've seen before.

And if this excellent performance, which makes the three hours of the eCAFE look relatively mediocre, remember that this Asus is up to a third more expensive than the Hercules model …

The charger too, at only 203 g, is a big success compared with some of the chunky models we've seen elsewhere in this survey.