Pull the trigger on 1005PE?

Ok, so yesterday was my birthday and I'm looking to treat myself. I'm wanting to jump on the netbook train, especially since I have a 15 hr flight back home coming in July (not to mention airport downtime as well). I'll probably be flying back to Japan this or next year and back here to Australia in 2 years. So one major motivation for picking one up is watching some video on the flight. It seems like this netbook can manage a 720p video which is fine by me. With such a small screen i'll dumb down any video to standard def anyway to save battery life. Can anyone comment on the video capability?

My major question is, with the new flash betas and such, how does it handle flash? From what I've read so far (and I'm still reading) it seems like it should run up to 720p youtube decently, but I haven't read a lot of definitive information. If anyone can comment on the flash issue, it would be greatly appreciated.

I've currently got 10+ tabs open about this netbook that I'm about to start reading, but any comments would help a lot!

 

The Asus 1005PE might have some trouble playing 720p videos due to the atom processor. Flash 10.1 Beta does perform better than the official release, however this is primarily due to the hardware acceleration feature which directs the video decoding load to the GPU. Since the 1005PE only has integrated graphics, I'm not sure if this will help much when playing HD movies.

 

It works well on the 4500mhd. I would suggest going for an HP Mini w/Ion graphics.

 

I had looked at the 311, but the problem is anything with an Ion doesn't have a long enough battery life. After some more reading it seems like 720p flash is out of the question but the system can handle local 720p videos. As I said before, that would only be a bonus as I plan on downgrading any videos for it to a lower def because of the small screen/resolution and better battery life.

 

I would wait for the new timeline series, as the 1810tx or whatever it is will have double the performance with around the same battery life.

 

But is it a netbook? Aren't the timeline's notebooks? I'm trying to go sub $400 netbook as I plan on buying a gaming laptop in July to replace my aging Dell.

 

The 1005PE is a great netbook and does only what a netbook will do, it will play HD movie trailers but will not play a full length movie or TV show without problems (CPU pegged @ 100%)if it's iTunes related, that why I'm returning mine. Some people have had luck using "VLC" as their player, mine would not even load VLC with Win7 Home Prem.. If you want to just surf the net, email play music and have a travel companion then it's great but not to play back movies or look at for hours because of small screen size.

 

I went ahead and ordered it. I originally placed an order with Amazon, but after I saw I was going to be charged sales tax, quickly canceled the order and placed it with NewEgg.

After reading more about the netbook and other ones, I have realized that the lack of hi def support is a worthy trade off to have such long battery life. It will only be used to play videos on long plane rides, in which I'll have standard def videos prepared for it anyway.