So this week I ordered one of these little babies: an Asus eee PC netbook. This is a newly released model with a 1.6 MHz processor, 1GB of memory, 160MB hard drive, and a battery that’s rated for ten and a half hours of use.

Let me repeat that: Ten and a half hours of use.

I thought, “Heck, I’ll be lucky to get six hours out of it…but that’s still really, really good. I should be able to use this for an entire plane flight with no problems. I can take it with me places and not worry about running out of power. Sweet!”

It arrived yesterday afternoon, and the manual said to let it charge for at least eight hours before first use. I plugged it in and left it alone until around 6:30 this morning, at which point I booted it up and unplugged it.

It’s now almost 10 PM, and the darn thing is still running. I’ve put it to sleep a number of times during the day; it’s not like I was typing at it the whole time. But I’ve installed a bunch of software, and read a lot of blogs, and just generally spent as much time as I reasonably could playing with it and using it…and it’s still going.

They say that you’ll get the based battery life out of it if you fully charge then fully drain the battery the first few cycles, which is beginning to get me down. I’d like to let it charge over night, but it’s still at 17% charge, and claims that it’s got an hour and twenty-three minutes left.

Plus, everything seems to work OK. It’s zippier than I was expecting it to be. It’s small enough to carry around; and gosh, I’m not worried about running out of power while out and about. On the whole, color me pleased and amazed.