The moment you open the box of the Asus 1005PR netbook, it starts to look really familiar if you’ve owned an Asus netbook.  The front of the box is identical to the 1000HE, 1005HA, and 1101HA that I currently own.

Once you open the box, and take everything out of the box you have to remove the netbook from it’s pouch, put the battery on it so that you can turn it on.  Visually, the carbon fiber look of the 1005PR is impossible to mistake.  It’s the same kind of coating which is used on the 1001PX except that it isn’t on the palm wrest area.  This coating helps to make sure that the lid doesn’t pick up fingerprints easily and make it a lot hard to spot scratches.

Once you actually power up the 1005PR you do quite a bit of waiting.  First Windows 7 has to setup and then it goes through some updating from Asus’ utility.  It took about 10 minutes for everything to finish updating then I was dumped into Windows 7 Starter.

Asus 1005PR Keyboard

The keyboard is the chick-let style keyboard Asus has been using in their netbooks as of late.  If you’ve never used it before, it’s great for touch typing since there is a space between the keys so you can tell that you’re typing one key over another.  It’s definitely different than the regular PC keyword you’ve been using or a typewriter keyboard.

Asus 1005PR Screen

One of the big differences between the 1005PR and other 10 inch netbook is it’s screen resolutions.  Most other 10 inch netbook are limited to a screen resolution of 1024 by 600.  It’s good enough for such a small screen but it doesn’t make watching video a very enjoyable experience.  Also many websites aren’t properly optimized for such a low resolution.  By comparison the 1005PR has a 1366 x 768 resolution screen which is great to type on, watch video, and browse the web.  It almost makes you wish every netbook had a resolution this high.  Text is sharp, images are too, and the color saturation is good for a computer this size.

Asus 1005PR Battery Life

I started using this netbook in the early evening at about 4pm.  Immediately I made sure the battery was at 100% charged, then proceeded to head over to Hulu.com.  My goal was to watch a few hours of video, test out the video playback, and see exactly how much I could put this netbook through and see how the battery held up.  At this point, it’s currently 11pm and after watching 2 hours of Sunday television I missed, and watching Jerry Maguire I was surprised to see how little battery life had been used.  From that point on I’ve been checking email, surfing the web and just making sure that it stayed on.  All told, I’ll be able to get a full 8 hours of use which isn’t the 11 hours that Asus tells you that you can get but it’s much better than a lot of other netbooks on the market today.

Asus 1005PR Video Playback

This netbook comes equipped with a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder to help it play online video smoothly.  More importantly it’s supposed to help you play online HD video.  When I first started using it I downloaded the latest version of the Adobe Flash player, and also made sure to grab the latest Broadcom drivers.  I wanted to make sure that there no excuses.  After all the updating, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that this can handle whatever you throw at it.  I watched YouTube HD at 720p, Hulu at 480p, TV.com full episodes in HD and didn’t have any problems with video stuttering.  The bad news is that if you don’t have a really fast connection you’ll think that the Broadcom card can’t handle it.  Don’t think that your 1.5Mbps DSL is going to instantly start playing blu-ray quality video just because you have a better video card.  If you’re going to stream it, you’ll need a great graphics adapter AND a fast connection.  They two go together like macaroni and cheese, salt and pepper, Abbot and Costello.

For the absolute best results, you’ll want to make sure that you’re watching video in Super Performance mode.  Also, upgrading from 1 GB to 2 GB also would help as would updating the hard drive to a 7200 RPM drive.  Everything will work without it but if you find that you’re experiencing issues and can’t afford more bandwidth

Final Thoughts on the Asus 1005PR

With an MSPR of $399, the Asus 1005PR isn’t the cheapest netbook on the market.  It also isn’t the most expensive.  The question is does it fill a niche, and do so meaningfully enough to suggest that other people would actually buy.  My answer is, it depends.  The mesh matte lid, Broadcom HD decoder, and higher resolution screen are all great upgrades on the already popular 1005PE.  Not having HDMI is the only thing which prevents me from telling everyone and their mother to buy it.  Regardless, it provides a great combination of upgrades for both a professional or recreational user which will be beneficial.  If I were going to buy a 1005PE, I’d probably save up a little more money to buy a 1005PR.  Otherwise I’d take my pick of other netbooks with shorter battery life, poorer screens, and overall less features.

[Update - For pictures of the Asus 1005PR, check out this post]

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