ASUS 1000H, 1000H or Inspiration 910

[frrobert]

I am wanting to get a netbook.

I have it narrowed down to the ASUS 1000, ASUS 100H, or the Inspiration 910.

Some flavor of Ubuntu will go on whichever one I get

The pluses I see for the ASUS is the 10 inch screen and greater drive space on the both the 1000 and 1000H. The 6 cell battery is also a plus. What I have been reading most folks get 4+ hours.

The minuses I see is it does take some tweaking to get it to run Ubuntu. I'm not sure if it gotten better but for a period it seemed that the SSD on the eee had a high failure rate and the keyboard flex issue.

The pluses I see with the dell is that it comes with Ubuntu configured for the device. The minuses I see are the smaller drive and screen size

The questions I have
How is the battery life on the 910? Does it really get 4 hours?
How is the build quality of the 910? ie how does the keyboard feel? Any problems with the SSD?

Thanks in advance.

[smartboyathome]

Have you checked out zareason.com? If you buy the EEE PC 1000 from them, they will put Ubuntu on it for you. :)

[frrobert]

Have you checked out zareason.com? If you buy the EEE PC 1000 from them, they will put Ubuntu on it for you. :)

Yes, I have and I think ZaReason is a great company. But if I get a 1000 eee from ZaReason it cost $599. Amazon is selling it for $485.58. I will admit I can be lazy but for over $100 I will put Ubuntu on myself.

[titus]

I've been looking at the same issue myself and have decided on the Asus 1000h. In my opinion the SSD of the 1000 is not a great advantage, as the speed and power usage does not offer much advantage over the hard drive (the SSD drives they use are not great)*. The keyboard on any of the 90x series is also much too small for me. I actually had a black 900 which I returned as the keys were too small.

A valid alternative for me was the lenovo s10, which I saw today. This is a much better looking machine than the 1000h (again my opinion, I prefer the flat design), but suffers from low battery life (3 cell vs 6 cell on the asus), a slightly smaller keyboard (I saw that it's 85% on a review site vs 92% of full size for the Asus), and apparently it gets hotter than the 1000h. They are planning a 6cell battery for the s10, but as I write this, it's not available here (China).

* http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=46433

s10 review : http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4620
1000h review : http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/asus-eee-pc-100h.aspx

You might also want to look at the Acer aspire one, I'm not too keen on Acer laptops though, so I skipped that model.