Laptop Thoughts: The Thick and Thin: ASUS Netbooks EeePC 1015PE and 1018P

"You'd think after running into ASUS's next generation Eee PC 1018P and 1015PE over five months ago at CeBIT, our excitement may have waned for the stylish netbooks. Oh, but it's actually the opposite, and when the brand new netbooks arrived last week, we grabbed the X-Acto knife (safely, of course) and eagerly unboxed them to see if the aluminum clad little laptops were as svelte as we'd remembered them."

ASUS has been very successful with their netbooks, and this duo will probably continue the trend. Pretty standard components for this class of computer, some slight differences, and the two models went back and forth in the 'which model is better' tests. It seems to me that the whole netbook genre is getting a bit stale, and, frankly, ASUS has (and has had) so many of them that it's difficult to keep track of them all. These two add aluminum-cladding, slide covers over the videocam, high quality fit and finish, attractive design, but otherwise don't offer much to set them apart from other netbooks in the $350 price range.