10.1” ASUS Eee PC 1005HR (1366 x 768) Review

Review Summary

The ASUS Eee PC 1005HR is one of the best looking, all-round performing netbooks on the market currently and one of the very few with a 1366 x 768 display. Super bright display, 7 hour battery life, excellent keyboard and multi-touch capable touchpad. Very quiet.

I actually recommend the 1005HR over the 1005HA series because it’s quieter and because of the higher resolution display, which you can adjust for a more comfortable viewing experience). This is ASUS’s best 10-inch netbook yet, the one to get.

The Eee PC 1005HR is currently only available in Japan, but I will update this review with pricing and availability when that info is available.

* I’m taking some portions of this review from my ASUS Eee PC 1005HA review since these machines are identical.

Technical Specs

ASUS Eee PC 1005HR-WS (Black) (EEEPC1005HR-W7BK)

• 10.1” 1366x768 LED Backlit Display (Glossy)
• Intel Atom N280 (1.66GHz) Processor
• Intel 945GSE Chipset
• Intel GMA 950 Graphics
• 1GB RAM (2GB max)
• 250GB HDD (2.5” SATA 5400RPM) + 500GB Online Storage
• 0.3MP Webcam
• 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• Stereo speakers, HD Audio
• 6-Cell 5800mAh 63Wh Battery (dummy SIM slot behind battery) - 8.5 Hour Battery
• Windows 7 Starter
• 1x Headphone Jack, 1x Microphone Jack, 3x USB 2.0, Card Reader, RJ45 LAN, Kensington Lock, VGA out, AC in
• Weight: 1.21 kg / 2.67 lbs

Box Contents

The contents are the same as most other Eee PC netbooks released up until now.

• Recovery DVD (Image) - The 1005HR also has a recovery partition setup already
• Wired mouse
• Black sleeve (I have been using it and find it adequate)
• AC Brick
• AC Cable
• Manuals
• Battery

Layout

On the front: LED status indicators. Two lights are visible on the outside, one when the 1005HA is on and the other when it is recharging (orange is not finished recharging - handy to know). The stereo speakers are located underneath the front area.

On the left: fan outlet, kensington lock, 1x USB, VGA and power.

On the right: Card reader, audio jacks, 2x USB, RJ45 LAN.

On the back: Nothing except the battery. Behind the battery is a dummy SIM card slot that has been plugged up. There are models that sell with 3G in parts of the world.

Inside: two buttons on each side. Power button on the right. Trackpad on/off button on the left. Flush touchpad with single rocker button and a keyboard taking up the full width of the machine.

Build Quality

I really love the design; lots of curved, rounded edges and the machine tapers toward thinness at the front. Very beautiful design.

Build quality is good. The last ASUS Eee PC I had was the 1005HA, which is identical to this 1005HR. I had a few minor build issues with that one but none or them are exhibited in this model. 

The 1005HR is glossy plastic ALL over. Except for the keyboard and the bottom of the chassis. Despite being very firm and solidly built, the plastic does give it a sort of cheap feeling, at least to me. I have the black model this time and it shows fingerprints really easily - the 1005HA white model I had was better at hiding fingerprints. You might want to invest in Phantom Skins or Invisible Shield to get rid of fingerprints (and protect your Eee PC at the same time)

Display

The Eee PC 1005HR is ASUS’s first 10-inch netbook with a 1366 x 768 display (glossy) - about time I say. This gives you the same resolution as you get on pretty much any larger notebook and is the biggest selling point with the 1005HR. The display brightness is adequate for indoors with 151 nits of brightness (1005HA has 126 nits), and even more so, if you use EeeCtl which pushes brightness to 291 nits. Not even larger 13-inch notebooks get this bright.

Whether you can use 1366 x 768 pixels on a 10.1” display is going to come down to personal preference. This is my first time using a 10.1” with this resolution. I found it a little hard on my eyes because everything is so small (text and pictures).. that is, until I found a good solution - first, I increased the standard font size from small -> medium in the control panel “display” section. This made text larger across the whole OS - except for browsers. I couldn’t find a solution for Chrome, but for FireFox I used a plugin called NoSquint which sets a default zoom level so you don’t have to keep zooming in for every webpage you go to. This works incredibly well - and when you actually need some extra resolution, just zoom out.

Because of the above solution - I now prefer using a 10.1” 1366 x 768 display over the standard 1024 x 600 resolution. 

Here’s a couple of examples of what things look like on a 10.1” 1366 x 768 resolution display:

One slight downside is that performance (mostly noticable when scrolling webpages) seems a little more sluggish than you would get on a standard 1024 x 600 resolution display. Not surprising since there’s more pixels to push on screen and the GMA 950 graphics on board, that you find in most netbooks, isn’t that fast at all.

Two more things I want to mention.

I wished the display would fold back slightly more so I can get an optimal viewing angle. I encountered this situation when working with the 1005HR at a desk. Every other situation was fine though.

Last, because this netbook comes with Windows 7 Starter I was unable to extend the desktop to an external monitor - a restriction of the Starter edition. You can only clone the display on two monitors, or use one for the display. I could go up to 1920 x 1200 (24” 16:10) on my 24” monitor, with no problems.

Keyboard

This section is taken from my ASUS Eee PC 1005HA review.

ASUS decided to go with yet another style of keyboard with the 1005HA. It’s no longer a chiclet keyboard but it is not a standard type of keyboard either. Unlike alot of other netbooks the keyboard on the 1005HA goes fully edge to edge taking full advantage of the 10-inch netbook size.

Note that I have a Japanese keyboard, so keys are overall a little smaller and the layout of keys is different.

The keyboard exhibits no flex at all and is very easy to type on with little error. Keys feel good giving just the right amount of feedback. Unlike some other Eee PC’s all the keys make the same noise without hitting anything strange underneath.

It might take a little getting used to at first coming from a different style of keyboard or a larger notebook but you quickly get used to it.

If there was one thing I had to point out is the tiny up and down arrow keys. They are always tricky to use and it can be very easy to mis-hit them since there is no spacing between the keys.

Touchpad

Like with the rest of the Eee PC Seashell range, ASUS uses a touchpad that is flush with the chassis and applies a subtle bumped surface across the touchpad. This is an unusual feeling at first but you do get used to it. The surface of the touchpad isn’t as slick as you would find on other netbooks and your fingers can get ‘stuck’ often.

The 1005HR, like the 1005HA supports multi guestures: two fingered scrolling, zooming and pinching. Unlike early Eee PC Seashell netbook batches - multi-touch scrolling works out of the box now. No need to hunt down the latest Synaptics drivers. I find that the Seashell range of netbooks as well as the Acer Aspire series (751 / 1410) have the most responsive touchpad scrolling. Unlike Acer’s, there doesn’t seem to be any two fingered swipes for going back and forth in the browser with ASUS’s.

By enabling the above gestures solves one major annoyance I had with the 1005HA which is the standard scrolling on the right edge. There is no physical edge so it can take a few guess swipes to see if you are at the edge. The bumpy surface of the touchpad is too subtle to be helpful.

As for the button, some people really hate single buttons, but its something you get used to in no time. If I had to point out one thing about the button is that it is flush with the chassis which has made me mis-hit it a couple of times.

There is a dedicated button to turn off the touchpad which is very useful if you use a mouse. It can also be done with a keyboard shortcut like on previous Eee PCs.

Sound

This section is taken from my ASUS Eee PC 1005HA review.

Sound quality is adequate as well as volume. Could use much more bass but it just passes my standards where I am not screaming “where’s the bass!!!”. I have been on several plane trips and volume through the headphone port could have been louder. A problem I have had with a lot of netbooks. Luckily, VLC player had an option to boost sound output to about 400% (I think) which made speech understandable and made watching movies enjoyable)

If you are in Linux though, be aware that the sound settings are not set to 100% so you don’t be surprised if you have low sound volume in Linux. There is more than one switch you have to adjust to fix this in Linux.

Microphone & Webcam

I used Skype 4.1 to check out both of these features.

I wasn’t too fond of the microphone: even with noise cancelling turned on, there was too white noise going on in the background - even in a silent room. I haven’t experienced this on many netbooks - and it only seems to turn up on Eee PCs. I also have to put my head right up to the microphone to get decent volume even with the microphone volume set at maximum, but this is pretty normal for most netbooks.

Now for the webcam. Quality is decent (average) even with dim lighting but degrades (gets blurrier) in lower light situations. Still picks up a good image in dark rooms. Seems very average to me for a netbook webcam. Frame rates were good with no lagging.

Heat

I left the 1005HR running HD YouTube for an hour then came back to measure temps. The only area that feels warm is the bottom-left area, elsewhere it barely gets warm. On the top, the left palm rest was the warmest area. The right palm rest stayed cool.

Top tempatures:
Left palm rest: 35 °C / 96 °F
Touchpad: 33 °C / 91 °F
Right palm rest: 28 °C / 83 °F

Bottom temperatures:
Bottom-left: 42 °C / 107 °F
Bottom-right: 33 °C / 91 °F
Top-left: 36 °C / 96 °F
Top-right: 31 °C / 88 °F

Noise

Surprisingly, unlike previously Eee PC Seashell netbooks I’ve reviewed (1005HA and 1101HA), the 1005HR is very quite!

This is what I wrote about the Eee PC 1005HA previously:

The fan on the 1005HR can get very noticeable at times and at other times seems very quiet. It will ramp up to easily audible levels if you leave the 1005HR on for a while. I’m very sensitive to fan noise from computers but this one just barely passes, thankfully.

I don’t know if the 1005HA came from a bad batch or if all 1005HA’s perform similarly, but there’s a big difference with the 1005HR. It’s very quiet - and never ramps up at all. I had to keep putting my head to the keyboard to hear the fan. I ran a YouTube video and let it run for an hour but the fan (and noise level) did not ramp up at all. Extremely impressed. I tried running manipulating the fan level with EeeCtl but it did nothing - not that you even need it.

Upgrades

This section is taken from my ASUS Eee PC 1005HA review.

Like most netbooks out there these days, the 1005HR only allows you to upgrade the RAM up to 2GB. You can access the HDD and Wi-Fi card by opening up the 1005HR but you have to void your warranty to do so.

If you are interested in opening up your Eee PC 1005HR, then this rel=“nofollow” excellent guide will help you.

There might even be some internal differences between the 1005HA but I won’t be opening this up to find out.

Size & Weight

The ASUS Eee PC 1005HA weighs 1.21kg including the 6-cell battery (1005HA weighed a tad more at 1.26kg). The battery itself weighs 311g.

Here is a pic of the Eee PC 1005HR on an A4 piece of paper:

The power brick is the same tiny power brick you get with all Eee PC netbooks. The only difference with the Seashell range is that the power plug is now much smaller than the older Eee PC models. It looks more fragile than ever before but it’s great in that it’s very non-intrusive when plugged in, more so than any other netbook out there.

When placed on a table the actual height of the 1005HR is 27mm / 1.06” (back) - 38mm / 1.5” (front). If you exclude the battery and the rubber feet, it’s 20mm / 0.79” (front) - 32mm /  1.26” (back) in thickness.

The dimensions for the netbook are 264mm x 178mm x 20mm ~ 32mm. Or, 10.4” x 7” x 0.79” ~ 1.26”.

The touchpad area is 83mm x 53mm or 3.3” x 2.1” in size. The keyboard is 251mm x 116mm / 9.9” x 4.6” in size.

Here is a weight comparison between some 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch netbook / notebooks:

Some comparison pics with a few objects around with house (including an 11.6” HP Pavilion DM1)

Direct size comparison between the 10.1” Eee PC 1005HR and 11.6” HP Pavilion DM1:

Battery Life

The Eee PC 1005HR has a 6-cell battery rated at 8.5 hours (5800mAh, 53Wh) which is the exact same battery as I had on the 1005HA rated at 10.5 hours). The difference would be because of the higher resolution display needs more power to drive.

Here are some battery life figures I obtained with the Eee PC 1005HR:
* All tests where done in power saving mode and 7/16 brightness, or 44% brightness which equals 90 cd/m2 brightness when calibrated using the native white point of the 1005HA.

6 hours, 53 mins - Blogging (90% web-surfing, 10% YouTube videos) with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth ON.
6 hours, 31 mins - Watched looped 480p (DVD quality) movies, 100% sound, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth OFF
5 hours, 40 mins - Watched looped 720p movies, 100% sound, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth OFF
5 hours - Watched looped 1080p (Blu-ray quality) movies, 100% sound, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth OFF

Looking at the above figures I would say you’d get 7 hours battery life out of the Eee PC 1005HR. Let’s compare battery life with other netbook / notebooks (using my 480p full screen video test):

Performance & Video Playback

Like with all netbooks out there, the Achilles’ heel is video playback. The highest quality YouTube videos will become slideshows when played. 1080P video is not possible. Smooth 720P video is not possible unless you install CoreAVC codecs (not free). I tried overclocking to 2GHz to play a H.264 720P video and it almost played 100%, except sound was stuttering - not that this matters since it wouldn’t be very stable at that high a speed. Kind of a shame since you’ve got ample resolution for 720P video.

As far as general performance - netbooks are relatively slow. Coming from using several 11.6-inch notebooks with CULV processors for a couple of months then going back to netbooks - I could really feel the difference in speed. Still I was able to spend a whole day using it as a desktop replacement without getting too frustrated with the speed. I wouldn’t mind to be using it daily as a desktop replacement - unless all I did was browse the web, write office documents or listen to music.

Here’s performance of the 1005HR in power saving mode and super performance mode, compared against my desktop computer and an Intel CULV dual-core SU2300 processor found in the Acer Aspire 1410:

Running in Super Performance mode offers quite a noticeable improvement across the board and you can feel it. Relatively though, compared to the CULV platform and desktop performance is WAY behind.

Linux

I installed the final version of Ubuntu 9.10 on the Eee PC 1005HR and everything works 100% out of the box. Wi-Fi, hotkeys, resume from standby, brightness and audio. Features you won’t get in Linux (at least out of the box) are multi-touch scrolling and touchpad disable button. Ubuntu has it’s own CPU scaling program which takes the place of SHE and works nicely - but I don’t think it overclocks like with SHE.

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