What do you do if your netbooks are starting to look so last season? Well if you're ASUS, you hire a leading industrial designer like Karim Rashid to revamp it, of course. The Eee PC 1008P's snazzy new design and removable battery certainly caught our eye at CES, but now so is its $499 pricetag. Positioned as a designer netbook, the 1008P is a mixed bag of specs -- it has got the now-typical Intel Atom N450 processor, boasts 2GB of RAM and larger 320GB hard drive, as well as a disappointingly small three-cell battery. So, are the 1008P's slimmer body and eye-catching design enough to make you shell out $100 more than the typical netbook? And how does the the smaller capacity battery compare to the $380 Eee PC 1005PE's that lasts for eight hours on a charge? Follow on past the break for some answers.
ASUS Eee PC 1008P (Seashell) review
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Gallery: ASUS Eee PC 1008P review | 26 Photos
Look and feel

The Eee PC 1008P is thinner than most netbooks, and its 1-inch thick chassis is the same as the 1008HA, meaning that all the ports are hidden behind teeny doors. In a space saving move, there's a mini VGA port on the left hand side, and the VGA adapter pops out of the bottom of the netbook. Pretty cool trick, but fitting that adapter back into its place was extremely frustrating. The rest of the standard netbook ports are laid out along the edges, though the 1008P only has two USB ports rather than the typical three.
Under the lid is the same keyboard and touchpad set up as the 1005PE. We're still fans of the rubbery feeling dotted touchpad and chiclet style keyboard -- we'd still like to see the right Shift key made full size, but we like its improved placement to the left of the up arrow. Despite the nice looking frameless 10.1-inch screen the viewing angles are still poor; pushing the screen back causes images to be washed out and viewing the screen from the side wasn't much better.
Performance and battery life

PCMark05 | 3DMark06 | Battery Life | |
ASUS Eee PC 1008P (Pine Trail, 2GB RAM) | 1531 | 152 | 3:20 |
ASUS Eee PC 1005PE (Pine Trail) | 1431 | 157 | 8:10 |
Toshiba Mini NB305 (Pine Trail) | 1272 | 156 | 6:30 |
ASUS Eee PC 1201N (Dual core Atom, Nvidia Ion) | 2208 | 1555 | 2:26 |
The biggest change in performance really comes in battery life -- because of its thin stature the 100
Wrap-up
