With the S101, Asus took a first big step away from the generic design of the early Eee mini-laptop series. Asus started the whole netbook fad with the Eee series of mini laptop computers, but their design didn’t really strike a chord with the fashion-oriented young crowd weaned on sleek ultraportable laptops like the MacBook Air. So, with the model S101 Asus tried a different and thinner approach to the netbook concept.

Compared to its siblings, the Eee S101 is something of an all-out luxury model made of high-quality materials and with a much thinner profile. One might question the choice of color on the S101 though, as a glittery gold(ish) brown wouldn’t be my personal favorite color to cover my new laptop. Surprisingly it looks quite visually appealing in spite of the color, much thanks to the otherwise very eye-pleasing design of the slim chassis. The s101 battery is placed flush with the bottom of the computer instead of protruding, which is normally the case with the Eee PC series. The result is a much better looking mini laptop.

Under the hood you’ll mostly find the usual hardware, albeit with a few exceptions; it has the Intel Atom N270 ticking away at 1.6GHz and 1GB of RAM – more or less the standard equipment in any mini laptop computer. However, instead of a hard drive, this laptop is fitted with a 16GB solid state drive. This storage space is rather small, but can be expanded by putting an additional 16GB in the SD card slot. Keep in mind, however, that this isn’t one of the fast variety SSDs that ship with more expensive laptops, but a smaller and comparatively slow netbook variant.

TheLED backlit 10-inch screen on the Eee s101 has a 1024×600 resolution, and the graphics are handled by the tried and tested Intel GMA950. In terms of performance, this mini laptop computer ofers few surprises, but that’s not the point of the S101. It’s supposed to appeal to anyone looking for a more exclusive, and good-looking netbook, and that it does.