ASUS Eee PC 1201N review
By Joanna Stern 
posted December 18th 2009 4:10PM
posted December 18th 2009 4:10PM
Six months ago netbooks all had 10-inch displays, fairly cramped keyboards, and couldn't manage to play a 1080p video even if they trained with the best of marathoners. The world's a lot different now: the King of Pop has passed away, the unemployment rate has dropped, and netbook manufacturers have realized 11- and 12-inch displays provide a more comfortable experience -- especially when paired with more powerful hardware that adds multimedia prowess.
We'll stop there with the Netbook 101, but looking at the past is necessary in realizing what a game-changer the ASUS Eee PC 1201N really is. The 1201N's dual-core Intel Atom processor, NVIDIA Ion graphics, Windows 7 Home Premium, and 2GB of RAM make it the most powerful netbook to ever grace the purchase pages of Amazon. But does the $500 machine fix all the issues and frustrations we've ever had with netbooks when put to the test? Can it make us forget about cramped keyboards, strained eyes and sluggish video performance? Find out in our full review.
Look and feel
Wider than 10-inch netbooks, the 1201N is a bit harder to slip into a small shoulder bag (or purse), but it'll travel well in a laptop bag at just 1.2 inches thick and 3.2 pounds. There's also more room for ports: three USB, an HDMI, VGA, and a headphone and mic jack surround the chassis.
When you open it up, the 1201N continues to be fairly impressive, with a super-comfortable full-size chiclet keyboard. The matte keys have a nice tactile response and the wider deck accommodates two full-sized shift keys. The trackpad is actually flush with the case and only differentiated by a grid of raised dots that feel great on the fingertip. Two-finger scrolling was fairly smooth in Firefox 3, and definitely not as unpolished as recent HP laptops. ASUS's chrome rocker continues to peeve us; it's loudly clicky and the lack of dedicated right and left mouse buttons caused a few mis-clicks.
The 1366x768 resolution 12.1-inch LED-backlit display isn't flush with the bezel, but it's still plenty spacious and crisp -- we'd be remiss not to mention how lovely the green trees looked in a 1080p clip of the Amazon rainforest. A word of caution to those who hate glossy screens: the 1201N's screen is reflective enough to function as an effective mirror.
The 1366x768 resolution 12.1-inch LED-backlit display isn't flush with the bezel, but it's still plenty spacious and crisp -- we'd be remiss not to mention how lovely the green trees looked in a 1080p clip of the Amazon rainforest. A word of caution to those who hate glossy screens: the 1201N's screen is reflective enough to function as an effective mirror.
Performance, graphics and battery life
Packing a dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom 330 processor typically found in nettops, NVIDIA Ion graphics, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, and a 5,400rpm 250GB drive, the 1201N is hot to trot on specs. The dual-core processor provided noticeably better performance than the standard netbook's single-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU -- everyday multitasking performance in Windows 7 Home Premium felt much snappier. The benchmarks back us up: the 1201N notched a Geekbench score of 1,106, higher than both the N280-powered HP Mini 5101's 920 and the NVIDIA Ion / N270-backed Lenovo IdeaPad S12's 826. For comparison's sake, the Intel CULV HP dm3t we just reviewed scored a 1,602, so while the 1201N is powerful for a netbook, it doesn't quite match up to a thin-and-light.
Speaking of Ion, the GeForce 9400-based chipset provided a pretty sweet multimedia experience on the 1201N. A series of trailers played back smoothly from an external Blu-ray drive with no pauses both on the 1201N's screen and a 42-inch 1080p HDTV. With Adobe's GPU-accelerated Flash Player 10.1, YouTube HD and Hulu HD were incredibly smooth on the 1201N's screen and over HDMI, but local playback was a little rougher: a downloaded 1080p, H.264 QuickTime video of Miley Cyrus struggled a bit with a few pauses here and there, although it was still watchable.
Speaking of Ion, the GeForce 9400-based chipset provided a pretty sweet multimedia experience on the 1201N. A series of trailers played back smoothly from an external Blu-ray drive with no pauses both on the 1201N's screen and a 42-inch 1080p HDTV. With Adobe's GPU-accelerated Flash Player 10.1, YouTube HD and Hulu HD were incredibly smooth on the 1201N's screen and over HDMI, but local playback was a little rougher: a downloaded 1080p, H.264 QuickTime video of Miley Cyrus struggled a bit with a few pauses here and there, although it was still watchable.
We've never bothered running games on netbooks with integrated graphics before, but the 1201N handled lighter games like WoW just fine. Our gnome was happy to make it to level four at 30fps. The more GPU-intensive Batman: Arkham Asylumn stuttered at the native res, but was surprisingly playable at 20 fps when we lowered it to 1024 x 768.
All that performance and graphics gain is great until you realize that it takes a hit on the 1201N's battery life. Its six-cell battery lasted 2 hours and 26 minutes with a 1080p WMV video running on loop, and we got about three and a half hours of runtime using the laptop to just surf the web and write this review in Microsoft Word. That's not terrible battery life, but it's not so great compared to other six-cell netbooks like the ASUS Eee PC 1008HA, which runs for about six hours.
We did get a kick out of the bundled voice recognition software: we commanded it give us the weather in New York and it brought up a weather map within a few seconds. We almost wrote this paragraph without complaining about any preloaded software at all, but that was until ASUS' preloaded screen saver started up with hold-type music in the background. Seriously -- remove this crap before you do anything else with this laptop.
Wrap up
The 1201N is a new type of netbook -- although we aren't even sure it should be called a netbook, since it's more like a full-fledged laptop. Regardless of what you call it, at $499 the Eee PC 1201N quelled our netbook frustrations by delivering a more comfortable computing experience and far superior multimedia performance than its 10-inch brethren. It offers neither the stamina of a netbook nor the performance of a $600 ULV laptop, but it's a solid compromise between the two, and we're extremely happy with it. Just make sure you pack a spare battery or two.
@Ozymandias It's more like 17%+ when looking at the underemployed. No, it hasn't dropped.
at $500... you should buy a CULV with SU2300, it'll run circles around the atom 330
@(Unverified) And along with that CULV, you get Intel integrated graphics. So although your CPU performance will be better, anything that uses the GPU will suffer greatly.
@(Unverified) Okay, sure in theory. But at least if I don't need to play games on the thing, it performs VERY well, unlike this thing. And it will handle HD Flash just fine thank you very much. Sure it probably won't play back Blu-Ray rips, but then this thing won't either apparently. And if you read some of the posts above people seem unimpressed with its gaming ability too...
@Rollins
Well, the thing is, not many applications are going to rely on the GPU anyway. CULVs can play HD video fine without hardware acceleration. Most of these CULV laptops have the GMA 4500MHD anyway so you get H.264 and VC-1 hardware acceleration too. So that only leaves 3D games. So good luck playing a game on that tiny screen for about an hour when the battery dies.
DIE GLOSSY DIE!
Cute, but honestly for $500 I would just get a laptop.
This type of Netbook would be "Netbook Friendly" if it was at most $399. anything beyond that is just blah....(personal opinion :D )
wait it has a dual core atom??? and ion??? wowowowo should i get this instead of the canon rebel t1i and lens i was supposed to buy today?
@poematik14
No, you should buy the Pentax K-x with lens.
Thanks for the review, Joanna. If you find that this item - or any item - is temporarily sold out on Amazon, you can use the free service http://www.aznotify.com/ to watch inventory and notify you (with an obnoxious alarm) the moment it comes back in Amazon stock at the regular list price so you can buy it quickly before it sells out again.
While I've always wanted a netbook with a dual core Atom (I simply cannot stand the single core one...Really) The price on this is getting a little too close to a nice 13-14 inch laptop.
first engadget review in a while that has been conclusively positive. i applaud you, joanna.
as to the whole netbook/culv deal: of course the line is blurred. the tech industry can't draw a line and then leave it there for longer than about 9 months. i paid $400something for my msi wind last year. only 100 dollars more than that for a second core PLUS graphics (even if they are nvidia) is nothing to shake a stick at.
i think she nailed the compromise bit on the last paragraph. seems to me that it'd be worth it though. i've always dreamed about a full-sized right shift key and a few more vertical pixels on this "old-style" netbook..
I think I'll wait until the 1201T comes out. I want to see how AMD's Congo stacks up against the Atom.
Last month for a magazine I wrote a netbook buying guide. I discussed what I call netbook "default" features and configuration that most netbooks now have. (I won't mention them because you all know what they are.)
However, I will mention one, that is, PRICE. The appeal of netbooks, I argued, is that the price hovers at about $250 for an older spec machine and at most about $400, but an average being about $300 to $350.
I mention this only because the bone to pick I have with manufacturers coming out with this notebook-priced netbooks is that they are defeating the netbook concept, which was a low-powered, ultra light traveling machine, for about $300.
When netbooks are priced at $500, well that's not a netbook, it's a notebook, albeit a small one.
Recently I happened upon some Dell notebooks on sale. And I saw some HP models too. Both companies had nicely configured notebooks that were priced about $450 after rebate.
True, you can't toss those in a briefcase or backpack without knowing it's there, but it just seems to me that manufacturers are forgetting their roots, so to speak.
what's with the rocks background?...
Still waiting on my tablet with a 64bit processor, 4 gigs of ram, gpu and a 12.1 inch screen with 6+ hours battery life....
but this is decent for half a grand.
I think it might be worth waiting to see the new pcs with ion 2 and the ne atoms in them.
Damn, the Battery life seems stupid ! Just 3 hours on a 6-cell ? Damn, This ain't a netbook anymore ! :(
I was really looking forward to this ! :(((
Asus net/notebooks have one thing in common, you can't break them. They may not be the fastest, or prettiest, but they work (sorry Apple).
Very nice and ASUS is a great company!
Okay, so every netbook that gets reviewed the Engadget commenters jump out and repeat the same things--"where's the dual core?" and "where's Ion"? Now there's a netbook/laptop that has both that they can actually buy, and from the tone of the comments above it seems like most of those people aren't going to buy the thing. I don't get it.
Sure the price went up. Want to guess why? Cuz the parts cost more.
Sure the battery life went down. Want to guess why? Cuz they put parts in it (dual core 330, Ion) that consume more power.
These were obvious things. They were a given. You should have figured out when you asked for this that these things would happen.
We'll see what the sales numbers on this thing are in a year or so and whether this category takes off. My bet is it won't, as both thin 'n lights and even regular laptops can be had for the same price with better performance, features, battery life, etc. We'll see soon enough...
@Fanfoot
I will probably buy it (haven't completely decided, may wait till CES), the price doesn't bother me too much. The biggest annoyance with this is the battery life (though it was kind of expected) it will still be kind of weird going from my Eee PC 1000HE with 8 and a half hours of battery life to 3 or 4 of regular use, but I think it is still worth it.
Yes! In that category of computers it is one of the best.Like you said the keyboard is excellent. They have that cloud storage thing where you can get more than the 250GB hard drive it comes with and the battery life is pretty good, up to 10.5 hrs.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Bowtrol-Colon-Cleanse-Review---Does-Bowtrol-Cleanse-Work?&id=2926555
From the photos, it looks like they're off to a rocky start.
Fair price for this machine: 325~400 EURos, now lets see for how much it's gonna show up on shops...
ASUS is actually one of the few brands that price most their products accordingly in most regions.
Thanks for pretty photos on rocks. Too bad you can't tell which netbook is the 1201N or what the other ones are...
hackintoshable?
"Framerates per second"
Good review though
@B3CU Yeah, normally I hate to nitpick, but the multiple references to "framerates per second" were kind of annoying.
Like others here, this is pushing the boundries of a 'netbook'.
And I previously said I wouldn't buy one unless it has a 11" screen - well, I got my Gateway LT2030U and its 10.1" screen is just right - although the keyboard is a bit cramped for my touch typing.
Why exactly is this a 'netbook' and not a laptop?
I mean.. it is a nice enough little machine but the money and the specs seem to put it squarely in basic laptop category.
It is nice that the netbook revolution took the knees out of paying through the roof for decreased size and all...
But now we are here on the other side.. and I think this is just a small laptop.
Did you honestly say "the unemployment rate has dropped" ? The unemployment rate has been the highest its been since the early 80s you Obama loving hippie.
give my x61 anytime... old stuff but lovely.
Well, if like me you are looking for a HD video capable net/notebook which is as small as possible but has a bigger keyboard than my current slightly cramped 10in Eee, and has decent multitasking, the search is over. Thanks Engadget. You guys do a ripping job of keeping us in the know!
@ Asus Inc.
Nice try at making an asus with a little more power. Alas, you fail. People did not want a bigger screen, nor a bigger keyboard. I understand that you need the space in order to add in that second RAM slot (which i love) but, disregarding the others, I am totally willing to risk thin-ness to keep 4GB max ram, and my 9 inch screen. Otherwise, good shot at a computer, but don't forget the meaning of netbook.
PS: the new bumpy touchpad is gayyy.
People are sooo critical. I understand people want something small. but seriously. These 1201N's you can lift with 2 fingers and toss it around the house they are so small and lightweight.
And yea, it's to large at 12" and the Processor is terrible, for the same price you can get a CULV Laptop that has a SU4100 or something in it... Ya, with the GHETTO Integrated 4500M graphics that can Barely play a Youtube video or scroll on basic web pages without not being happy. It doesn't matter, It's what Each Person needs for himself.
Yes the SU4100, or 7300 or whatever CULV processors are better, but there integrated graphics cripple them severely. This 1201N is actually a great little device that can do it all. (in a netbook sense) but ya it is a little large, but I welcome that, cuz now web pages fit better and typing is easy.
If you don't need graphics EVER.. get the CULV ASUS UL30 type Laptop, but if you do need graphics get this baby! and thats what I'm doing.
Also, read any review that compares this to other netbooks, or even the HP Mini 311. and even thought the CPU isn't a large increase in performance. It helps cut the bottleneck on the ION graphics, and it daily web browsing with multiple tabs and multi-tasking. the N330 makes that little difference that makes things smoother than on the Mini 311.. many many reviews have mentioned the small increase on the Dual core Aton N330 make a large difference in terms of smooth operation and daily use.
I think it's a Winner!