Battery life
Each system's battery was run down completely and recharged before each of our battery life tests. We used a 50% brightness setting for the Timeline, which is easily readable in normal indoor lighting and is the setting we'd be most likely to use ourselves. That setting is roughly equivalent to the 40% brightness level on the UL80Vt, Studio 14z, 1000HA, and 1005PE, which is what we used for those configurations.

For our web surfing test, we opened a Firefox window with two tabs: one for TR and another for Shacknews. These tabs were set to reload automatically every 30 seconds over Wi-Fi, and we left Bluetooth enabled, as well. Our second battery life test involves movie playback. Here, we looped a standard-definition video of the sort one might download off BitTorrent, using Windows Media Player for playback. We disabled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for this test.

The Eee PCs were tested in their default on-battery configurations and again in high-performance mode, which runs the Atom CPU at a full speed.

Excellent battery life has been a staple of six-cell netbooks, and the Eee PC 1005PE leads the rest of the field in both of our run-time tests. You're looking at about nine hours of web surfing time and eight hours of SD video playback, which is really quite impressive for such a lightweight and inexpensive system. Students looking to take notes and keep themselves entertained through a full day's worth of classes shouldn't have to resort to a wall socket with this latest Eee PC.

I do wonder just how long the Eee PC's battery will last, though. My 1000HA used to get 4.5-5 hours of run time on its six-cell battery, but after a year of frequent (although not heavy) use, I've lost at least an hour and a half. The 1005PE isn't necessarily destined to suffer the same fate, but it's something to keep in mind. For what it's worth, I've seen plenty of full-size notebook batteries degrade over time, as well.

External operating temperatures
External operating temperatures were measured with an IR thermometer placed 1" from the surface of the system. We took these measurements after the Eee PC had run our web surfing battery life test for a couple of hours.

Yeah, Pine Trail runs cool. Only a few of the Eee PC's surfaces get warm to the touch, and you should have no problems propping the system on your lap for hours on end, even when it's fully loaded.