Asus has decided that it wants to play ball with the likes of HP and Dell in the business netbook market, which must be a diminishingly small market to compete in. Yet the new Eee PC 1005HA Business edition is here to take on the likes of the HP 5101 and the Dell Latitude 2100.

So what sets the Eee PC 1005HA Business edition apart from the normal 1005HA? Well, for starters it comes with Windows XP Professional (as a Windows Vista downgrade option for some strange reason) and it has 2GB of DDR2 memory as standard.

Apart from that the only difference we can tell is that it’s silver coloured rather than black or white. We would’ve expected a little bit more from a product that is targeting the business user, but in all fairness, the standard Eee PC 1005HA is a pretty decent netbook.

The rest of the specifications as they stand consists of a 10.1-inch display with 1,024×600 resolution, an Atom N280 processor, a 160GB hard drive and 10.2h of battery life. The 1005HA Business edition will be available in Japan from the 20th of October for the fairly steep sum of €478/$715.