I have in my home, as of now, 2 PCs (a desktop, and a server/media-centre), 3 Android phones, an ebook reader, a crappy-but-cheap Chinese Android tablet - and 3 'netbooks'. The newest addition to the menagerie is an Asus Eee PC 1215N, which rather wipes the floor with the its two predecessors...

Threw the N1 in there for comparison, just to make the point that a 2010-era smartphone can even outspec an EeePC 701, in the right light - same resolution screen, though obviously smaller with a much higher DPI, faster CPU in terms of raw clock speed, longer battery life and although the 701 has more storage than an N1, my N1 typically has a 16GB microSD card in it. Anyway, back to the 1215N.

I picked it up at the Hong Kong Computer & Communications Festival on 20th August - notable because there is, as far as I know, no firm release date for this machine in the US, and Amazon UK were listing it with a pre-order fulfilment date of August 23rd, but have just updated it to September 7th! I've had my eye on this model for a while, and knew it was due out late August or early September, but hadn't heard anything at all about Hong Kong release dates, so I did something a bit naive - I simply called Asus last week and asked them. After being passed around a couple of times, I was quite shocked to get a straight answer ("at the computer festival this Friday") to a straight question, since I was fully expecting to be told that they hadn't announced a date, and certainly weren't going to randomly disclose it to an anonymous individual caller - kudos to Asus.

Going back to that Amazon.co.uk listing, while the date has changed, the price has stayed the same, at £429 (US$666, €524, HK$5180). The machine is actually available in a few other places, and looking at a Swedish site they are listing it at 5290 Kronor (£459, US$712, €560, HK$5540). There is no price available for the US, but rumours are placing it around US$500 (£321, €393, HK$3888) - which to be fair would exclude any sales taxes, unlike the European prices. Me, I paid HK$3780 (US$486, £313, €382) in cash and took it home - there are no sales taxes in Hong Kong, and there was no delivery charge or delay - so I think I did pretty well there!

Inside the somewhat-sparse brown cardboard box was the laptop, the battery (see below), a charger with a UK (and therefore HK) figure-8 cable to plug into it, a warranty card, and a relatively simple manual in English and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. The guys who sold it to me were nice enough to throw in a case - ugly-but-functional - an extra year of official Asus warranty, and an antivirus package - entirely useless to me. Not exactly an extensive package, but that's probably a good thing in these green days...

There appears to only be one 1215N model number across the world, but there are a few variable specs which will change depending on where you get the machine. In particular, mine has a 320GB hard drive (but some may have 250GB), a 6-cell battery (4-cell being the alternative), 3 USB 2.0 ports (some models advertised with 2 USB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0) and 2 GB RAM in the form of 2 1GB sticks (as opposed to 4GB or even 1GB options). While I'd quite like the USB 3.0 ports, just for future-proofing, I'm reasonably happy with the HK spec, and while 4GB RAM would be nice, it would be pretty easy, and not particularly expensive, to upgrade it myself since the two SODIMM sockets are in fact the only easily-accessible and user-upgradable innards.

Now, I Don't Do Windows^TM. The 1215N came with Windows 7 Premium something-or-other, but I Don't Do Windows^TM so I got rid of it pretty sharp-ish - shoved Ubuntu on it, because that was what I had lying around, and what I've been running on my older EeePCs, but I'm not sure what it'll end up with. I did see Windows 7 running on demo units at the 'festival', and it seemed to run alright, for Windows. Did I mention that I Don't Do Windows^TM? The salesman did run up the Windows Experience doodad, and while I can't remember the exact scores, they were 5.something for the memory and disk tests, and 3.something for the CPU, graphics and gaming - not too bad in the scheme of things for a device like this, I think. Anyway, I Don't Do Windows^TM so let's move on.

On paper, at least, it's somewhat comparable to the MacBook Air - the 1215N has a slightly smaller screen with a slightly higher resolution, a slower CPU but not massively so, the same amount of RAM, much bigger hard drive, theoretically-similar Nvidia graphics but with a lower-power, lower-performance Intel chip as well, and slightly more heft, 1.45kg (with 6cell battery) vs. 1.36kg for the MacBook Air. The Air is much much thinner, 19.4mm at its thickest compared with 37mm for the 1215n - but then the 1215n has a smaller 'face'. The kicker, of course, is that the Air costs over 3 times as much as the 1215n - I'm not trying to suggest that they are in the same class as machine, just point out that there isn't as much difference as you might think...

The hardware

For a netbook, it's pretty big and heavy. The photo shows a clear comparison with the Eees 901 and 701, but other photos clearly show why - the 12 inch screen is huge compared with the 9incher, and makes the 7 inch screen on the original Eee PC look like what it is, a toy. On the other hand, I've always called them 'little laptops' instead of netbooks, and that name fits well. The hardware is actually somewhat of a hybrid - it's a netbookish screen, but it has a full-sized keyboard and a CPU designed for a nettop (i.e. a 'little desktop'), with the upside being higher performance and the downside being less power management than chips designed for true 'netbooks'. As I mentioned above, it's also got hybrid graphics, with a low-power, low-performance Intel chip and a higher-performance, higher-power Nvidia chip, although the switching isn't working with Linux at the moment - I'm not much of a gamer, and multi-threaded decoding largely makes up for the lower graphics performance when viewing video files.

At this point, I'm pretty happy with the new toy. The Linux support is slightly lacking - small things like the sound driver needing a tweak to support the headphone socket, and bigger things like the Nvidia Optimus stuff being largely implement in the Windows drivers only. I'm sure things will improve - it's a pretty new machine, and Linux drivers have a nice habit of quietly getting better support for new hardware.