Asus has announced yet another member to its increasingly crowded Eee PC line.  Somehow, the 1000HE does manage to distinguish itself though.

The Eee 1000HE is notable for two things, well maybe one and a half: its keyboard and its processor.  The keyboard on the 1000HE boasts a new key layout that moves the right shift key to the left of the arrow keys.  This may not sound like much, but it makes a huge difference for touch typing.  Far too many netbooks (the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 immediately come to mind) make the mistake of putting the right shift key at the edge of the keyboard, where it is too far away to comfortably reach.  Also, the 1000HE has adopted the individually separated key design originally made popular by the MacBook.

The Eee PC 1000HE is also one of the first netbooks with Intel’s Atom N280 processor.  It is not too different from the N270 found in most current mininotebooks, but it does boast a faster clock speed (1.66GHz) and front-side bus (667MHz).  In laymen’s terms, expect faster performance.

The Eee PC 1000HE should be available any day now for $399 with a 6-cell battery that is said to last over 9 hours.  You can pre-order it now and get a $25 discount.  This sounds like a great deal for a newer model netbook.  As always, it is nice to see computers come down in price while offering better features.

LINK to the Laptop Magazine post.

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