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>> I'm Dan Ackerman, and we're here to take a look at the Asus EPC1005HA. Now it may seem that Asus puts out a new version of its ubiquitous Netbook every couple months. It's easy to get lost in the mix, however this latest version is one of our favorites. What it does is it keeps the slimmer, more stylish tapered design of the last model we looked at, that was the 1008HA. But it takes the non-removable battery and swaps it out for a regular old 6L removable battery, and it takes all the ports and connections on the side and just sticks them in there instead of hiding them behind these weird little flaps that the previous model had. It also cuts the price a little bit, which is always good. And this guy has the best battery life we've ever seen on a Netbook, almost the best battery life we've ever seen on a laptop. So put all that together, and that's why this is an Editor's Choice laptop for us. Inside the 1005HA you're gonna find a fairly standard set of Netbook components. You've got a ten inch LED display, you've got an Intel atom processor, the slightly faster N280 version, you've got a gig of RAM, Windows XP, and a 160 gig hard drive. We like the keyboard that Asus is using these days, it's got these wide flat keys that are fairly easy to use, and it's got full sized shift keys, that's actually really important. The touch pad is a decent size for a Netbook, it's got this little raised surface on it so you can kind of feel where the touch pad starts and ends. We're less crazy about the single bar mouse button, we kind of like separate left and right mouse buttons. Asus has a lot of power options actually, and you can get to them on this model by holding down the function key and hitting the spacebar. And that lets you set up their energy saving plan so you can get a little bit more life out of this guy. Although at six plus hours you certainly get plenty of time, whether at the coffee shop, on an airplane, this should last you pretty much all day. But possibly the best thing we like about this new model is that the previous 10HEPC was like four twenty nine, it was a little bit over that three ninety nine sort of psychological barrier for a Netbook. This new buy comes in at three eighty nine, which puts it right in the middle of the pack for sort of upscale Netbooks. The cheapest ones are like two ninety nine now even. But the new price combined with the longer battery life makes this probably our current favorite Netbook. I'm Dan Ackerman, and that's the Asus EPC1005HA.
