Had a nice long look at Asus’ new Eee Pc S101 at the shops. To be honest, I was quite looking forward to it. I love how much lighter and thinner it was, and the glossy panels made it look a lot nicer too (almost like the Acer Aspire One). The brown isn’t actually that bad of a colour in my opinion, a contrast to what other blogs (Engadget) have said.
Unfortunately, the keyboard was still way too small (about the same size as an Eee Pc 901), but an advantage of the keyboard was the shiny coating. Wait, what? Who cares about it? I think it’s an anti-bacterial coating, but there’s no mention of it anywhere on Asus’s website.
The 10.2″ screen looked pretty nice too, compared to other Eee Pc’s out there. The S101 had the size of a 901, despite its 10.2″ screen. The keyboard has the same 901 keyboard size too, not the “extra comfort” (according to Asus) keyboard of the 904, 1000, 1000H etc. making it hard to type which such small keys. Battery life is a bugger as well, with only 5 hours (compared to its bigger brother, the 1000H, with 8 hours of battery life). This is quite a surprise as I thought the SSD allow the battery to last longer, but the S101 proberly has a smaller battery to fit with its size.
If you’re a road warrior, my suggestion is to stick with the 1000H with its 8 hours battery life, instead of the S101’s 5 hours, even though that means carrying a bit more weight. According to Asus’s S101 press release, you’ll get a 30GB online Cloud Storage (EeeStorage.com) instead of the previous 20GB storage, so that’ll satisfy your storage needs beyond the tiny 64GB SSD. Talking about storage, there’s a 4 in 1 flash card slot, for MMC, SD, Memory Stick and MS-PRO. Other low end Eee Pc’s just have a SD card slot.
