Asus N 1 OJC-A 1

we don't care if you call it a net­book or a notebook. The Asus NIO, with a IO.2-inch screen (800 x 480), 1.46-inch maximum thickness, and 3.I-pound weight, is a slick ultra-portable with a sweet surprise. Yes, like other net­books, this one uses the I.6GHz Intel Atom Processor N270 paired with the Intel 945GSE chipset. This means that the Intel GMA 950 graphics engine is built in. However, flip a little switch on the left edge before booting, and you can boot using discrete Nvidia GeForce 9300M GS graphics. You pick Intel for battery life and Nvidia for performance. How big is the performance difference? Potentially huge. With CUDA-enabled apps, some tasks that would normally bring this nctbook's Atom N270 to its knees (say you want to transcode your media files with Nero Move or watch something encoded in H.264) will be considerably better, thanks to the 9300M GS. At the end of the day, though, this is a platform for basic 2D and 3D entertain­ment; the Atom N270 remains a perfor­mance bottleneck.

Our unit shipped an 8-in-I card read­er, I.3MP Web cam, HDMI port, Ex­press Card slot, and fingerprint reader built into the touchpad. You'll have to load apps from an external USB or LAN source, be­cause there's no built-in optical drive. Honestly, the NI 0 was a little heavier and thicker than we would've liked. The screen bezel feels excessively thick, but we're guessing this is a concession made by opting for a 1 0.2-inch screen along with a comfortably broad keyboard. Still, we reviews I hardware found the screen very decent for prolonged viewing, including for video playback. We love the button above the keyboard for tog­gling between different power/performance profiles. In High Performance mode with Wi-Fi enabled and all power-saving fea­tures disabled, we achieved a battery run­time of 4 hours and 54 minutes-nice. The NIO is convenient, affordable, and effective for nongaming tasks. We hope this sparks a trend in pushing the enve­lope for nctbook expectations .