Asus has announced the much anticipated Eee PC 1000HE, which was shown earlier this year at CES. The biggest advancement is the new keyboard, which has borrowed its design from Sony and Apple to a degree.

Apart from the much improved keyboard, which by the way has the right hand side shift key put back in its right place, the 1000HE will come with either an Atom N270 or N280 processor. We're not sure if this is market dependant, or if Asus will be offering both at different pricing. Oddly enough, Asus doesn't mention the chipset used in the press release, nor on the product page and as such we presume it's the good, old 945GSE.

Asus also claims that the 1000HE can manage 9.5h of battery life, although this is with all the battery saving features turned on. However, the 8700mAh battery should make it close to possible, despite the usually over inflated battery life claims. Other features are fairly standard for an upmarket netbook as the 1000HE comes with 10in 1,024x600 display,  802.11b/g/n WiFi, a 1.3Megapixel webcam, a 160GB hard drive, 1GB of DDR2 memory, an SD card reader, three USB 2.0 ports, a D-sub connector, an Ethernet port and two audio jacks.

At 1.45kg the 1000HE isn't as light as some other netbooks in the same class, but the extra battery life might be worth it for some. No availability date or pricing was announced.

You can find the product page here