Asus Eee PC 904

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Review

Well, this is it – the last Eee PC-branded ultra-portable that Asus will be launching. Well, for the time being, at least. As with the Eee PC 1000, the Eee PC 904 isn’t really anything new – it’s just a repackaging of existing components intended to fill what Asus perceives as a gap in its line-up.

We’re less convinced of the need for what is essentially an Eee PC 900 in an Eee PC 1000 shell (which is itself just a scaled-up Eee PC 901), but that’s only because better netbooks than this are available from other manufacturers – and Asus is hardly likely to worry about that.

The Eee PC 904 uses the same case as the Eee PC 1000, but the similarities are only skin-deep (you can watch our video comparison here). Inside, the 904 uses the same Intel Celeron-M chip as the Eee PC 900 rather than an Atom N270 processor, but this makes little difference to performance. In fact the 904 is rather faster than the 901 and a little quicker than the 1000, but we suspect these figures are due to the 904’s 80Gb hard disk being rather quicker at delivering data than the SSDs in the other two netbooks.

Unfortunately, that processor and hard drive do have an adverse effect on battery life and even with its 6600mAh cell, the Eee PC 904 can only manage four hours of light use. Now this isn’t bad per se, but it really doesn’t justify the extra weight that the battery adds – after all, the smaller, lighter Eee PC 900 only ran for 45 minutes less in the same test (and with a lower capacity battery, too); the marginally more expensive Eee PC 901 lasted for eight hours.

Still, the main reason for buying the Eee PC 904 is to get a bigger keyboard than that on the 900 and 904, and in this respect it doesn’t disappoint. The keyboard is the same as that on the Eee PC 1000, but we reviewed a pre-production version of that netbook and so couldn’t pass final judgement. Happily, the production keyboard on the 904 more than passes muster. There’s a little bit of flex at either end, but it’s certainly comparable to the keyboards on the MSI Wind U100 and Advent 4211 and is very comfortable to use. Oh and it has a full-size Enter key too, though the right-hand Shift key is still half the size it should be.

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