Fast forward, and I spot my first iPad: on the Tube, its user oblivious to the envious gawping of fellow travellers. For me, it had a similar effect, heralding the arrival of another exciting, innovative type of product.

That’s not the only parallel between netbooks and tablets but, as far as I can see, others aren’t nearly so positive. The netbook’s story has been a sad one: that initial flurry of excitement withered by staid products, precious little evolution and a stagnant market.

Look beneath the iPad – which is still a premium product – and the tablet market could suffer from many of the same problems.

The signs are already there: the market is flooded with a host of shoddy, near-identical products from established tech brands, no-name newcomers and bandwagon-riding outsiders, and innovation is hard to find.

Look under the hood of almost every tablet and you’ll find similar components, with cheaper models boasting obsolete hardware that’s not good enough to run Angry Birds, let alone the more demanding software currently being churned out by eager developers. Uninspiring design dominates the exterior, with cheap iPhone and iPad ripoffs dominating the market.

Almost all of them run Android and, in almost all cases, they disappoint the user with a litany of problems: build quality is often poor, screens are grainy or, even worse, made with unresponsive resistive technology. Plenty don’t have access to the Android Market, instead using an awful third-party store or making do without any legitimate way to install new software.

It’s a familiar story for those who’ve followed the netbook market: shoddy build quality and screens were found across dozens of devices, and a lack of hardware innovation meant they were also of limited use – and soon overshadowed by low-powered laptops.

There’s still hope for tablets. Apple’s forging its own wildly successful path but, away from iOS, only a handful of manufacturers, such as Sony and Samsung, are forging ahead with innovative products. Microsoft, meanwhile, is placing plenty of stock in Windows 8.

Will that be enough to help tablets avoid the same fate of netbooks? It’s still a growing market – tablets have just overtaken netbook sales for the first time – but there’s a big chance it could head in the wrong direction if more people buy, and are disappointed by, sub-standard products. Perhaps Sony exec Mike Abary was right back in 2008: a “race to the bottom” might seem tempting but, in the long run, it does more harm than good.

Let us make one thing absolutely clear: these are the most stunning laptops to ever bear the Asus brand. They’re also the best looking Ultrabooks we’ve seen so far – more alluring than Toshiba’s, Lenovo’s and Acer’s.

And there’s no doubt about it, Asus better have the lawyers ready, because these two new models bear more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s MacBook Air.

The circular swirls on the lid add a welcome bit of individuality, and both models sport a metal chassis that tapers from 3mm at the front to 17mm at the rear. Combined with gloriously stout build, it’s hard not to come away impressed. The build quality is excellent, and while our Asus contact winced as we tried to snap their latest laptops in two, the chassis barely flexed at all.

The specifications are just as impressive. The 11.6in UX21 partners a 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M processor with 4GB of memory and a 128GB SSD, while the 13.3in UX31 is identical apart from two crucial upgrades: it’s got an even speedier 1.8GHz Core i7-2677M processor, and the display resolution bumps up from 1,366 x 768 to a spacious 1,600 x 900.

Asus claims around five hours of battery life for the baby of the range and over seven hours for the UX31, but the real fanfare was reserved for the system’s resume and standby abilities. While both systems spring from deep sleep in just two seconds, the UX21 is able to last a week on standby and the UX31, two weeks.

If there’s one casualty of Asus’s ruthless fat-trimming, though, it’s connectivity. Both models plump for two USB ports – USB 2 on one side, USB 3 on the other – and both shrink their D-SUB and HDMI sockets down to miniature proportions. You’ll need to make sure not to forget the Micro-HDMI and mini-VGA adapters on your travels. The only difference on the larger UX31 is the addition of an SD card reader – Asus couldn’t quite find room for one on the UX21, apparently.

Beauty and beastly strength aren’t the Zenbook’s only qualities, however, and Asus’s latest feels every inch the luxurious Ultrabook. The stiff base means that there’s not a hint of wallow in the keyboard, and the Scrabble-tile keys feel crisp and lively. The subtle scooped-out profile on each key is a nice touch, too, helping the smooth keys grip each fingertip for a more confident feel. In fact, our only gripe is the lack of keyboard backlighting – a disappointing omission.

The large glass touchpad beneath seemed pretty solid, but we’ll definitely want to spend a little more time with the Zenbooks before we make a final judgment. We’ve no qualms with the silky smooth surface, which makes for accurate, responsive cursor control, but we’re not quite so sure about the slightly stiff-feeling buttons along its bottom edge – these might take a little more getting used to.

If you’re wondering about the price of admission to Asus’s Zenbook range, well, you may just be in for a rather pleasant surprise: the UX21 is up for grabs at £849 and the UX31 at £999 – a few hundred pounds cheaper than the comparable MacBook Air models. With both laptops available to order from 21 October at Currys, PC World, Comet and Amazon, and our review units just days away, we have a feeling that this is the Ultrabook everyone’s going to want to get their hands on. Stay tuned for the full PC Pro review.

Not wanting to let Android have all the fun with its new Transformer, Asus has also introduced a Windows-powered tablet: the Eee Slate EP121.

It’s a hefty piece of kit, with a massive 12.1in screen and a 17mm-thick chassis weighing 1.15kg – almost twice as heavy as the iPad 2. Still, that makes room for some impressive hardware, with an Intel Core i5-470UM running at 1.33GHz and bringing two cores, Turbo Boost technology and Intel’s latest integrated graphics within a TDP of just 18W.

It has 4GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD but, despite the lower-power parts included, battery life inevitably takes a hit. Asus claims that the EP121 will last for two-and-a-half hours when playing 1080p video.

The screen itself is bright and, using either a finger or the supplied stylus, our time with the machine revealed that the 1,280 x 800 panel is both responsive and accurate, and there was little lag to speak of. It feels a big step up from the sluggishness of Windows 7 tablets with Atom chips.

While we’ve never been keen on tablets sporting Windows 7, at this size it works quite well, and Asus will hopefully introduce some neat features to try and make the experience easier. For instance, an iPad-style home button at the bottom of the screen uses the Windows Aero theme’s 3D scrolling effect to switch between apps.

Asus ended our meeting by dropping a rather large bombshell, though – the Eee Slate EP121 will cost £999 inc VAT. At more than twice as much as an iPad 2, all that processing power inside will have to do the tempting.

We’ll have a full review next week, so keep checking the site for our verdict.

It seems like every reputable tech company – and some technologically challenged clothing chains – are leaping onto the tablet bandwagon, but at least Asus is trying something different with its latest addition.

It’s dubbed the Transformer, which should give some clue as to its function: while the bulk of the machine is a 10.1in Android 3.0 slate, it’s also available with a keyboard – attach the two together, and you’re able to fold the whole package up like a netbook.

As befits an Android 3.0 machine with an Nvidia Tegra 2 chip, the Transformer felt slick, with no hint of stuttering as we navigated its five homescreens, web browser and desktop widgets.

The hardware itself felt nice, too: the tablet is solid, its IPS panel – with a native resolution of 1,280 x 800 – appeared bright but not oversaturated, and the keyboard seemed responsive. Asus claims that, when docked, the Transformer will provide 16 hours of battery life.

Asus has loaded the machine with a handful of its own apps, too, but we’re not yet convinced – MyNet looks like a handy WiFi management tool, but MyCloud’s unlimited web storage comes with quite a hefty catch – it’s free for a year, but Asus doesn’t yet know if it will charge after that period has expired.

Asus has pre-loaded the Transformer with its own app store – dubbed @vibe – and, while the firm confirmed to us that its offerings will be tailored to the UK, all it currently provided was basic music and radio playback tools. Luckily, the Android Market is also accessible.

The Transformer will be available in 16GB and 32GB versions at £379 and £429 inc VAT, although Asus promised us that there will be discounted bundles.

We’ll have a full review next week, so keep checking the site to see if this Asus can transform a fast-moving market.

For now you can work around the issue by simply plugging all hard disks and optical drives into the unaffected SATA 6Gb/s ports on your motherboard. But Asus and Gigabyte are aware not everyone knows how to do that, so both have come up with ways to educate less tech-savvy consumers.

Gigabyte is offering its customers a small utility (left) to detect if a motherboard is faulty: simply download the Gigabyte 6 Series SATA Check tool and you’ll be told if you’re using the affected ports, with guidance as to which ports to use instead.

Asus has come up with a more basic solution, sending us the above close-up photo to illustrate exactly which ports could prove problematic. As you can see, Intel-controlled SATA 6Gb/s sockets are safe to use, as are the SATA 6Gb/s ports controlled by the third-party Marvell chip by which Asus adds more ports to its boards. Only the four SATA 3Gb/s ports are faulty.

Both are clear and simple methods of helping those who may be perplexed by all the talk of SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s. If you’re using a motherboard made by MSI, Intel or anyone else, these precise solutions won’t apply, but if you dig out your motherboard manual and use the photo above for guidance, you should be able to figure it out quite easily.

With the arrival last month of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, it’s time to revisit a familiar question: which operating system is best for a netbook? Linux-based systems may seem well-suited to lightweight devices (the original Asus Eee PC ran Xandros Linux), but there are advantages to the familiar interface and applications of Windows.

Indeed, if you buy a netbook today it will probably come with Windows 7 Starter, while older models are likely to be running Windows XP. Still, it’s easy to move from either to Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and of course it’s free. If you want to upgrade an older netbook to Windows 7 you’ll have to shell out £65 for the Home Premium edition, as Starter isn’t sold separately.

Each of these four operating systems has its attractions, but the key question is how each one performs on low-powered netbook hardware. To find the answer, I’ve spent the past few days installing them all – Windows XP Home, Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Premium and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, with all available updates – on an Asus Eee PC 1008HA, and timing a series of typical netbook tasks to discover which OS makes the most of lightweight hardware.

Test 1: Starting up and suspending

Nobody wants to wait around for their netbook to start up, or to wake from sleep. Happily, suspend and resume worked perfectly on all four operating systems, so I was able to time how many seconds each took to sleep and resume from an idle desktop, along with boot times from cold.

As you can see, I tested Windows 7 Home Premium with both the Basic theme and the standard Aero theme. For this exercise it doesn’t make much difference, but I suspected it might on later tests.

Result: Windows 7 is slower to boot than XP or Ubuntu, and the Home Premium edition, with its full complement of services and features, is the slowest OS. However, most of the time we expect you’ll be resuming a netbook from sleep, and here it’s effectively a three-way tie, with XP only a few seconds slower than the rest.

Test 2: Opening applications

For this test I used the latest version of OpenOffice.Org on all platforms (with the “Quickstarter” disabled) and opened the applications by double-clicking on a .DOC file and a .XLS file that had been copied to the local desktop. I opened each file twice, to get a measure of how quickly the applications were able to launch both from cold and once cached.

Result: Windows XP was clearly the fastest OS at opening and reopening applications, while Windows 7 Home Premium did poorly, especially with Aero screen composition disabled. Interestingly, Windows 7 Starter scored a consistent second place, while Ubuntu failed to distinguish itself.

Test 3: Web performance

For this test I loaded a variety of JavaScript- and CSS-heavy web pages into the latest version of Google Chrome and used the browser’s built-in monitoring tool to time how long each one took to render.

Result: Given the timescales we’re dealing with (that Y axis is in seconds), this is essentially a draw, though enabling Aero seems to have a deleterious effect on Windows 7 Home Premium — strangely, the opposite to the effect observed in the applications test.

Test 4: Flash benchmark

To test Flash performance I used the free Flash Benchmark 2008 by Snails Animation, using the latest version of Flash available within Chrome. None of the platforms was able to get further than the medium-detail test. This graph measures frames per second, so taller bars are better.

Result: Aero seems to knock a few per cent off Flash performance, but it’s clearly Ubuntu that fares worst. Linux users have long grumbled about second-class Flash support, and these scores illustrate their point.

Test 5: Video performance

WMV and MPEG4 video files at resolutions up to 720p played perfectly well “out of the box” under all operating systems. However, none of the operating systems could cope with HD files from either YouTube or BBC iPlayer — in all cases the framerate dropped to only a few frames per second, making videos wholly unwatchable.

Result: Ubuntu’s poor Flash performance seems to drag it down in iPlayer: in windowed mode, video was slightly jerky, and in full screen mode it was too juddery to enjoy. The YouTube player seems to suit Ubuntu, though, while visiting the same site in Windows 7 caused videos to stutter too much for comfort.

Conclusion

There’s no reason not to give Ubuntu’s latest Netbook Edition a try — after all, it’s free, and it’ll run direct from a USB flash drive or coexist with your existing OS. The simple Unity interface is arguably better-suited to a basic netbook role than either the dated XP interface or the feature-rich Windows 7 front end.

For basic web and productivity tasks, Ubuntu’s performance appears no better than Windows, and for online video and games it’s distinctly worse. So while Ubuntu gains marks for openness and simplicity, there are still good reasons to hang on to Windows, at least until Adobe gets Flash up to speed.

If you’re currently running XP, though, it’s probably not worth paying for an upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium: that OS isn’t designed for low-power devices, and it gave wayward performance in several of our tests. XP proved a stronger performer overall, and was the only OS to give a good experience across the iPlayer and YouTube tests. The interface is showing its age, but if that bothers you you can dual-boot Ubuntu and get the best of both worlds.

If, on the other hand, you’re shopping for a new netbook, Windows 7 Starter isn’t a bad deal. It’s not very customisable (for example, you can’t change the desktop wallpaper) and it doesn’t include any goodies such as Media Center or encryption tools; but its comparatively light weight lets it boot and open applications more quickly than Home Premium. Nor is Windows 7 as nippy as XP, but from an overall performance perspective the Starter edition’s as good as Ubuntu, and better with Flash content. By all means test-drive Ubuntu, but the truth is that no OS will magically turbo-charge your netbook.

Asus’ latest showcase highlighted a quartet of new products from its enthusiast-level Republic of Gamers range and, as usual, we didn’t come away disappointed – after all, the Taiwanese firm showed us the heaviest graphics card we’ve ever seen.

It’s called the Ares, is named after the Greek god of war and features two ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics chips strapped to one PCB. The choice of ATI graphics is certainly interesting: the last card in this range, the Mars, was named after the Roman god of war and included a pair of Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 cards. We’re assuming that the heat generated by Nvidia’s latest graphics cards is part of the reason for Asus’ switch of allegiances.

The list of specifications is mouth-watering. The combined GPUs boast 3,200 stream processors, each runs at 850MHz, and four gigabytes of GDDR5 memory is crammed onto the packed PCB. Asus’ own benchmarks, run in 3DMark Vantage, show a 25% increase in speed over a Radeon HD 5970.

Asus also promised a 600% improvement in airflow over a stock HD 5970 thanks to its design, which places a large fan in between two hefty copper heatsinks. While it works well to keep the card cool, it may require some scaffolding in your PC if you’d actually like to use the Ares: the card weighs more than 2kg and is one of the bulkiest we’ve ever laid hands on.

This type of power doesn’t come cheap, either. Asus couldn’t confirm a price just yet, but Josh Wu, product manager for the motherboard business unit, said that the firm was aiming for a similar price to the Mars, which launched at around £851 exc VAT and was made in limited numbers. An impressive piece of kit, then, but one that’s possibly for those with more money than sense.

Crosshair IV Extreme

Asus also unveiled two new motherboards alongside its weighty new graphics card. Like the Ares, both carry the Republic of Gamers brand, and both include some interesting features.

Taking pride of place is Lucid, which is the small green chip at the bottom-left of this picture. It’s a tiny chip that does a remarkable job: take Nvidia and ATI graphics cards and combine them into one multi-GPU setup. It’s activated by a driver install, and there’s none of the throttling that we’ve seen with ATI Hybrid Graphics, where the more powerful card is limited by the capabilities of the weaker chip – Lucid simply takes both cards and pools their resources. We’ve not seen it in action yet but, if it works, it’ll be extremely impressive.

Asus has installed five PCI-Express x16 slots on the board so, if you’re feeling flush, you could combine a pair of GeForce GTX 480s with ATI’s latest cards – and we’ve even been told that the dual-GPU Ares and Mars cards work with Lucid.

That’s not the end to the innovative features. A Bluetooth 2.1 reciever on the Crosshair IV Extreme’s backplate enables you to overclock your motherboard from the comfort of your smartphone as well as checking your system’s various voltages and clock speeds. Apps are currently available for Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile, with an iPhone version on the way.

Asus also showed off an accessory that, we’re sure, will only appeal to the keenest of graphics cards fans. It’s called the ROG Xpander and fits into the Crosshair IV Extreme’s first and third PCI Express x16 slots. The PCB is kitted out with four PCI-Express x16 slots, all of which run at x16 speed thanks to a pair of Nvidia NF200 chips – so it’s possible to get faster speeds than with the four slots on the board, two of which are limited to x8 speed when four graphics cards are used.

Asus was keen to stress that the Xpander is for the most enthusiastic of tinkerers and, given the sheer amount of heat generated by Nvidia’s latest graphics cards, we wouldn’t want to put four GTX 480s in such close proximity. Size is an issue, too, with Wu confirming that “you cannot use [the Xpander] in a chassis” because of its bulk.

On a more prosaic level, the socket AM3 board serves up four DIMM sockets for DDR3 memory running at speeds of up to 2,000MHz, a single PCI slot, two SATA/600 and six SATA/300 sockets and a pair of USB 3 ports on the backplate. Asus hasn’t confirmed a price for the Crosshair IV Extreme, but we’d bet everything we owned on it being higher than £200 exc VAT.

Rampage III Gene

The second Republic of Gamers board on show, the Rampage III Gene, is an Intel X58 board with an LGA 1366 processor socket. It’s also micro-ATX, and could prove ideal if you’re building a powerful system in a tight space.

Asus has crammed an impressive number of features onto the small PCB. Two PCI-Express x16 slots and single PCI-Express x1 and PCI slots sit beside six DDR3 DIMMs and two SATA/600 sockets. It’s not got the luxury features of it’s bigger brother, but it’s still got power and reset buttons on-board, a triangular heatsink, and a pair of SATA/600 sockets.

Luckily, the Rampage III Gene should be relatively affordable, too: Asus has confirmed that it’ll be priced similar to the preceding board in this range, which costs around £140 exc VAT.

Despite not being fully finished, two demonstration units are running on Asus’ stand. We spent a while playing, in the company of a slightly nervous-looking Asus rep.

The guts of the machine come as no surprise, and include 11n wireless and the now-standard netbook-style spec list of an Atom N270 processor, 1GB RAM and a 16 or 32GB SSD. At the back there are three USB2 ports, HDMI and VGA video outputs plus Ethernet and audio.

The most interesting part is the touchscreen built into the right-hand side of the unit. It has all sorts of clever little apps.

At first glance the screen display looks like a similar interface to standalone-app gadgets like the Chumby. The difference here is that the screen isn’t a separate bolt-on device running a linux derivative – it’s actually a secondary Windows monitor. That means the interface is pretty responsive and a lot more sophisticated than you’d expect. You can even bring up the Windows XP desktop on it if you want, albeit at a very odd portrait aspect ratio.

When you’re not using it to navigate menus, the touchscreen becomes a nice big touchpad to control the mouse on the main display.

There’s a proprietary wireless video transmitter to go with the Eee Keyboard, and although it’s technically an option Asus expects most units to be sold with one. There’s enough bandwidth to show HD video at 720P, and it was working flawlessly on the display stand with the receiver unit a few feet away. Unfortunately Asus was a bit skittish about us wandering off with one of the only two working samples in the universe, so we weren’t allowed to move the Eee Keyboard away from the receiver to see what the range was like.

So, assuming you want a PC in a keyboard – personally I don’t but I can see there might be some who do – the issue with the Eee Keyboard is the price. Asus tells us that it will launch at 550 euros including the video transceiver, which given the exchange rate will probably translate into something around £550.

It’s an awful lot to pay for a low-powered computer running Windows XP, and we’re yet to be convinced that the software running the secondary screen is solid enough not to act up at inconvenient moments.

Virgin Media, meanwhile, is the first mobile broadband company to release its own netbook and, while it’s undoubtedly very similar to Zoostorm’s offering – even sharing the same name, the ambitious “Freedom”, – it’s an interesting move and a good-looking product.

We eased back the lid, for instance, to find an edge-to-edge screen and glossy finish that instantly makes the Freedom look like a far classier affair than plenty of the slightly staid netbooks that we’re used to seeing, and the keyboard feels good, too, offering decent size and travel. We’re not sure if it can yet match up to the charms of the Labs-winning Samsung N110, but it certainly felt comfortable enough to use for extended typing sessions.

The trackpad also felt good, with the pad itself proving nippy and responsive and the pair of buttons – which we always like to see instead of a single rocker – felt light and supremely clicky. Build quality was also solid, with the screen exhibiting no more flex than is to be expected and both keyboard and wrist-rest feeling resilient.

Inside, it’s typical netbook fare, with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM promising to deliver entirely average benchmark results, and the 120GB hard disk providing plenty of storage. The included draft-n wireless is a nice touch but, in a slightly strange move from a mobile broadband company, there’s no in-built SIM slot, which is perhaps a fault in Zoostorm’s design rather than Virgin Media’s.

Instead, the Freedom is bundled with a Virgin Media mobile broadband dongle and, as is now the norm with mobile broadband deals, is offered for free when you sign up to a contract. In this case, deals start from £31 a month and include 10MB broadband and a landline phone, with the more expensive packages – costing £45 and £58 per month respectively – including faster broadband, more generous call packages and Virgin TV.

This raises the usual question, of course, of price: sign up for the cheapest 24-month tariff and you’ll be shelling out £744 over the course of the contract for this “free” netbook and, while this does include the price of the included TV, internet and phone packages, you’ll have to weigh up the pros and cons of the various deals offered by Virgin and its competitors: while T-Mobile doesn’t offer TV or phone access, for instance, its tariffs start at a mere £20 a month.

It’s also worth considering if it’ll be cheaper to just buy a USB dongle on its own and use that with your laptop instead, especially if you don’t necessarily need the extras that are included with Virgin’s various deals.

Our other major concern is battery life. The Freedom comes complete with a 3-cell battery that, it’s quoted, will last for two and a half hours – but, when the £304 Samsung N110 will last for more than eleven hours on a single charge, that’s not good enough. We’ll be sure to give the Freedom a thorough test in the PC Pro Labs but, suffice to say, we’re not expecting great longevity.

It seems to have the fundamentals nailed down pretty well, but there are still several question marks over the Freedom’s pricing structure and battery life. Suffice to say, the full picture will be revealed soon enough in the PC Pro review.

The company has teamed up with Microsoft to create the rather prosaic It’s Better With Windows website.

“Windows helps you quickly and easily get online and connect to your devices and services – without dealing with an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues,” the site proclaims. It then shows a series of videos, with Eee PC-wielding people going about their lives in blissful harmony.

For the vast majority of netbook tasks there is, of course, nothing better about Windows at all. Web browsing, email and basic word processing are just as easy with Asus’s Linux-based Eee PCs as they are with the Windows XP models.

The issues crop up when you start using netbooks more like full-blown laptops. One of the Microsoft/Asus videos show people uploading photos from their smartphone on to the Eee PC, and then editing them on the spot.

As Jack Schofield noted in yesterday’s Guardian this isn’t “a failure of Linux, it is the failure of the netbook idea”.

“You were supposed not to need a big hard drive and a powerful processor running Windows because all your applications would be on the net, and you’d access them via a browser,” Schofield writes. “But it seems most people preferred the system they already knew.”

Jack’s right. The ever-increasing spec (and price) of netbook hardware means there’s little discernible difference between a “netbook” and a low-budget laptop. The original concept of a £150 machine that does little more than web browsing has all but disappeared.

Windows hasn’t made netbooks “better”. It’s just made them laptops.