The company that started the low-cost notebook wave goes upmarket with the Eee PC S101. It’s slim, stylish – and officially Australia's most expensive netbook.
While every other vendor is clamouring for a piece of the mid-market netbook action around the $600 price point, Asus has released a premium Eee PC model costing almost twice the price.
The Eee PC S101 will carry a $999 price tag when it’s released in Australia next month. That’s a big ask and a significant degree of sticker shock for
any netbook, let alone the brand which kicked off the low-cost notebook revolution (the S101 will sell for over twice the price of the original 7 inch Eee PC 4G model.
So what will you get when you plonk down a ten $100 bills? Style, and plenty of it. Think of the S101 as ‘Eee PC meets MacBook Air’. It’s got the same underpinnings as the Eee PC and indeed most netbooks in its 10.2 inch class – Intel’s nimble Atom 270 1.6GHz single-core processor and 1GB of RAM.
However, whereas most netbooks of its size offer conventional 2.5in hard drives, the S101 opts for a 16GB solid state drive. At first we’ll get only the Windows XP model, however this will be followed by the Linux model at the same price but packing a 32GB solid state drive. Overseas the S101 can also be optioned up to a 64GB SSD for around A$150.
Wireless includes 802.11n and Bluetooth, although the webcam is still a puny 0.3 megapixels. Then there are three USB 2.0 ports, a multi-format memory card reader, yada yada yada. Asus also tosses in 20GB of free online storage, which of course isn’t just
any storage, it’s ‘Eee Storage’.
The battery is a four-cell Lithium Polymer slab sandwiched towards the front of the chassis, which Asus rates at five hours of life (and while early rumours claimed the battery would be sealed inside the case, it is in fact removable).
So where does our MacBook Air reference come into play? The S101 is the slimmest netbook yet, tapering from 25mm down to 18mm at its thinnest point (where it’s a hair thicker than the MacBook Air) and nudging the scales at just on 1kg.
That svelte head-turning appearance is continued to the chassis. The S101 is finished in a glossy espresso brown, soft champagne gold or sharp graphite on the outside, with a colour-matched brushed alumunium handrest on the inside.
It’s this emphasis on design, on the S101’s form more than just the pure function of the conventional Eee PC (which, let’s face it, would turn heads only for their dainty and novel size rather than any effort of design
per se) which combines with the super-sized SSDs and battery to send the S101’s price soaring so high.
The big question is, just how many people will be willing to spend $1,000 on a netbook when so much of that is largely a premium for the luxe look?