The Asus Eee PC range includes some small and lightweight netbooks and Asus' latest S101 model is no different either. It is all what its predecessors were and seems to be an attempt by Asus to induce some premium feel and high quality materials into the low-cost netbook segment.

It looks stunning in its premium finishes and crystal-adorned hinges. The lid is an unconventional metallic brown, while the palm rest and the lid hinges are in brushed aluminum. It is good to look at and extremely light too, at only 1.02 kg including battery. The 10.2-inch screen is LED backlit and has a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. I particularly liked the well-spaced out keyboard. There is adequate space to rest your palms and the keys bounce back crisply, aiding brisk and error free typing. But what I didn't like is the placement of the right shift key which has been awkwardly placed to the right of the up arrow key.

This tiny power-house is powered by the Intel's 1.6 GHz Atom N270 processor, comes with integrated graphics and 1 GB of DDR2 RAM. Its computing power is similar to its netbook competitors. We were able to benchmark the performance using 3DMark 06 and PCMark 05 while most other netbooks give up with 'out of video memory' errors. This was only a moral victory though, since the 3DMark score of 81 suggests that you cannot run any sort of gaming or graphic intensive applications.

The Eee PC has 62 GB storage space, of which 32 GB is available immediately. There is a 16 GB SSD along with a 16 GB SD card in the box. The extra storage comes by way of
30 GB Eee Storage which can be accessed online. The machine comes preloaded with Windows XP, which is now only available for low cost PCs. The OS startup and shutdown speed is blazing fast and the applications respond immediately. This could be attributed to the fact that SSD drives are quicker than traditional hard drives.

Despite the dimuinitive size, the S101 managed an excellent battery backup of 4 hours and 20 minutes with WiFi switched on.

Other specs include WLAN 802.11n, a total of 3 USB ports, Ethernet, VGA out, Express card slot, headphone and mic and the memory card slot. It does not come with an optical drive though. If you need one, you'll have to attach an external one using USB. A 0.3 MP webcam and microphone is built-in for video/VoIP chat. Overall, the EeePC S101 is a practical combination of value, performance and good looks. Except for graphics performance (which you shouldn't be looking for anyway) it does everything else quite well. And its great battery backup makes it just perfect for the style-conscious frequent traveler.