Asus S101 is luxury netbooking at its finest

s101.jpgThe Asus S101 is so good looking it had Susi dribbling at the mouth (so much so she caused a temporary computer glitch) but her computer’s back up and running now and she’s back to normality. So perhaps I should warn her I have further Asus S101 details that could be potentially hazardous to her computer.

This is a netbook for the style conscious. Say goodbye to that plastic encasing usually found on Eee PC’s, this one comes wrapped in aluminium with a skinny body to match. It’s not just the casing that’s had a design overhaul – the keyboard’s been made over too with a multi-touch mouse pad that’s been made bigger and better. The S101 also waves goodbye to a big and bulky battery pack. Now it houses a more lightweight battery pack at the front of the case, which not only makes the little lappy more lightweight, but also gets rid of that unattractive bulge.

It shares a few of its specs with the Asus 1000, such as an Intel Atom Processor and 1GB RAM but uses a 16GB SSD, rather than an 80BG hard drive. 32GB and 64GB models are to come later.

Something this good has to have a defect, and the S101 doesn’t get away with being completely flawless. Sharing something else in common with the 1000, is its 10-inch screen with a screen resolution of 1024×600, which is decent enough, but a higher screen resolution would have made this laptop even more covetable. The operating system of choice is provided by Windows, which might disappoint the Linux fans.

At £450, the S101 could be accused of ignoring the underlying netbook premise of cheapness, but to be fair to Asus it has raised the bar in terms of style, so why shouldn’t it demand a higher price?

[via Stuff]

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Lucy Hedges