Asus unveils designer Eee PC

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 8 Oct 2008 at 16:14

Asus has taken the covers off its Eee PC S101, an attempt to bring the brand slightly more upmarket.

The effort principally concerns the look of the laptop, which has slimmed down to 18mm at its thinnest edge and 25mm at the back, with a weight of only 1kg.

There's no optical drive but the S101 does feature three USB ports, a 4-in-1 card reader, Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. There's also a 0.3-megapixel webcam above the 10.2in display.

Early buzz surrounding the S101 touted it as a potential MacBook Air rival, but under that slight frame it remains defiantly a netbook. There's a 1.6GHz Intel Atom, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of solid-state storage on the Windows XP version. A Linux version will also ship with a 32GB solid-state drive.

The S101 is expected to arrive in the UK in mid-November with a price tag of around £449.

The Eee PC brand has been a huge success for Asus, which recently announced that it had broken company records by selling 700,000 laptops in a single month, driven by the Eee PC.