Hands-on with the Asus Eee PC 1000HE

We've been hearing some good things about the new Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook – improved keyboard, bigger battery, better performance – but now we've been able to see it for ourselves. A model arrived in the Mobile Computer office earlier today, so we shot a hands-on video prior to publishing our full review.

The Eee PC 1000HE is the first netbook to use Intel's new Atom N280 processor, which has the same 1.6GHz clock speed as the more prevalent N270 (well, it's actually 67Mhz faster), but a much higher bus speed – 667MHz compared to 533MHz. The N280 is also a bit more frugal, drawing just 2W of power rather than the N270's 2.5W – but there is a bit of a gotcha with this chip.

Despite its tweaked specification, it's unlikely that the N280 alone will deliver much of a performance improvement over the N270 – we're still running our benchmarks, so we'll let you know in the full review. The real performance increase is expected to come from the N280's companion chipset, the Intel GN40.

The problem is that while this chipset is claimed to offer greatly improved graphics and HD video performance, it isn't yet available to netbook manufacturers and so Asus had to push the Eee PC 1000HE out of the door without it. We won't know how big a deal this is until we're able to test a netbook with the GN40 chipset, and we don't know when that's likely to be at the moment.

The Eee PC 1000HE makes a positive first impression, though. The chiclet-style keyboard is much more pleasant to use than the old Eee PC 1000 model, and the sleeker, smoother case (something we only noticed after making the video) is far easier on the eyes.

Atom N280 processor and 802.11n Wi-Fi aside, there's little else that's new in the Eee PC 1000HE, but it's good to see Asus finally paying some attention to the appearance of its netbooks – albeit long after the likes of Samsung and MSI launched their more stylish NC10 and Wind (respectively) models.

We don't know when the Asus Eee PC 1000HE will be available in the UK, nor how much it will cost, but we can guess at soon” and “about the same as the Eee PC 1000”. Look out for our full review in the next few days.