Opinion: It ain’t heavy, oh wait, yes it is

Yes it uses Intel’s ‘Atom’ CPU so the battery lasts longer, but for some reason, the thing now weighs more than the magic 1kg mark. Asus previously touted the light weight as one of the major benefits, claiming “children and women” could carry it easily.

Either the Atom chip must be made out of old wombats or Bluetooth parts are much heavier than you’d think.

And that’s the 901 version. The 1000 model weighs in at 1.33kg, which is a full 30% heavier than the outgoing 900 editions. OK, so the 1000 has another inch of LCD display and that also means the keyboard is closer to full size, but is this going to help or hinder sales?

Asus has also caved-in on the storage front offering a real hard disk inside the 1000H model. This is marketing spin at its very best – sell a million Eee PCs by pointing out how the lack of a hard drive makes it so safe, so portable, so light, so energy efficient. Then offer a hard drive in the next model. Uhuh.

So what really happened? Did some weird focus group convince the company that they’d never sell another million without a real hard disk inside? You just know there’s some PR expert somewhere at the bottom of this retrograde decision.

Come on Asus, somebody has to be the one to make a stand! Drop that hard disk and stick with SSDs! After all, if we want a chunky, fat, clunky notebook with only an hour of battery life it’s not like we don’t already have plenty of choice. We don’t need the Eee PC relaunched wearing a fat suit.

But you can send me a 901. I think I can carry the extra 200g. I’ll skip lunch for a week.