ASUS Eee PC 1008P Seashell Karim Rashid Edition

Intel announced its new Pine View platform for netbooks just before Xmas and CES 2010 was awash with new models that made use of it. The first to hit the Mobile Computer office is the ASUS Eee PC 1008P Seashell Karim Rashid Edition but, as the name suggests, there’s a bit more to this netbook than a new processor.

The Eee PC 1008P has been designed in part by industrial designer called Karim Rashid — and no, we’ve never heard of him either. He presumably handled the outside, while ASUS took care of the inside, but he certainly seems to know what he’s doing.

The netbook It comes in two colours — ‘hot pink’ and ‘coffee brown’, and both have the same dramatically textured case that combines a deeply grooved grid pattern with a rippled finish. This covers every inch of the Eee PC 1008P’s outside, top and bottom, and we’ve never seen anything like it — but we do like it.

The hot pink model has a shiny metallic finish and possibly won’t be to everyone’s taste, but the coffee brown colour is matte and a bit more restrained. The idea behind the Eee PC 1008P is to turn low-cost ultraportables into fashion accessories and both models are certainly trendy enough to tout around under one arm.

Unusual looks aside, both models are slim and light, with a sleek profile that hides the ports behind flaps at either side of the case. There’s the usual selection, with the exception of a Mini-DisplayPort rather than VGA, but ASUS has cleverly hidden a compact Mini-DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter behind a magnetic flap on the netbook’s underside. Surprisingly, the slim chassis also houses a slender 2900mAh removable battery that slips into a slot on the underside — again hidden behind a removable panel.

Lift the Eee PC 1008P’s lid and the inside is just as good-looking as the outside, although it’s a good deal tamer. There’s a near full-size (around 90%) Scrabble tile keyboard with good size keys, and it feels solid across its whole width. The multi-touch trackpad is nice and large too, and although it’s simply a slightly textured part of the plastic palm-rest, the matte finish means that it works smoothly under a sweaty fingertip.

The 10.1” LED-backlit screen is bright and clear, and although ASUS has stuck with the usual netbook resolution of 1024 x 600, it has pimped it up a little by extending the glossy top layer to the edge of the bezel for a sleek, frameless look.

Intel’s Pine View platform brings a number of new features to netbooks, but not much in the way of extra performance. Power consumption is claimed to be 20% better than the old Diamondville platform, which should bring some improvements in battery life.

With Pine View comes the Pinetrail processor — or the Atom N450, to use its given name. This is still a single core chip (with Hyper-Threading) and runs at 1.66GHz, so it won’t be much snappier than current Atom N270 and N280 offerings. The big difference, however, is that it now has onboard graphics in the form of the Intel GMA 3150 controller. This is still pretty puny though, and has no HD video acceleration, so its integration with the processor package is really nothing more than a way to reduce Intel’s chipset manufacturing costs more than anything else.

Inevitably, this means that the Eee PC 1008P isn’t up to playing HD video and HD YouTube clips are very jerky when viewed in HD mode. This graphics controller isn’t one that will be supported by Flash 10.1 for video acceleration either, so it looks like owners of Pine View netbooks will be stuck with SD video viewing.

General performance with Windows 7 Standard feels no different to any other Atom-powered netbook we’ve used, but we couldn’t run our benchmarks for a definitive test. The Eee PC 1008P gave a Windows Experience Index figure of 2.4 though, if that’s any indication of how well the new processor performs.

ASUS claims a battery life of “up to” six hours for the Eee PC 1008P, but we weren’t able to test this either — BatteryEater Pro refused to run in its light-use Reader mode. Classic mode ran fine though, and the netbook lasted for two hours and 49 minutes when being pounded with this intensive test. Based on past netbook experience, we can extrapolate this to a light-use time of around five and a bit hours, so ASUS’s figure doesn’t seem too wide of the mark.

So, how much? ASUS tells us that the Eee PC 1008P Karim Rashid Edition will sell for £349 in the UK and will be available from PC World and Curry’s some time in February. That’s a bit more than other 10.1” netbooks with similar specifications, but it’s still pretty good value for a model as strikingly designed as this one. Er, two.