Asus Eee PC S101

At $699, the S101 is on the high end of the Netbook price range, but it is certainly cheaper than most laptops with brushed aluminum wrist rests and bodies only a hair thicker than the MacBook Air. If you don't mind the performance compromises of a Netbook, but want something more substantial than a plastic body, the S101 and HP's 2133 Mini Note PC are two well built alternatives.

Unfortunately, the S101 has one fatal flaw that had us muttering to ourselves and nearly tearing our hair out the right Shift key has been lopped in half. Touch typists beware!

The tiny keyboard decently balances key size and layout to maximize typing comfort, but the right shift key has been unceremoniously cut to half size and moved just to the right of the up arrow.

The end result after several days of regular use was that we continually mistook the up arrow button for the right shift key (and easily churning out several thousand words of prose each week, we consider ourselves far from amateur typists).

Specification

• Price as reviewed or Starting price $699
• Processor 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270
• Memory 2GB, 533MHZ DDR2
• Hard drive 16GB SSD (x2)
• Chipset Intel 945GSE
• Graphics Intel GMA 950 (integrated)
• Operating System Windows XP Home
• Dimensions (WD) 10.4 x 7.1 inches
• Height .63.88 inches
• Screen size (diagonal) 15.4 inches
• System weight / Weight with AC adapter 2.4 - 2.9 pounds
• Category Netbook
  

The Asus Eee PC S101 looks little like the plastic Eee PC models that preceded it. Instead, this slim laptop has more in common with ultrathin ultraportables, such as the Toshiba Portege R500 or the Lenovo IdeaPad U110. Less than an inch thick, with a brushed metal wrist rest, clearly the idea was to build a Netbook that wouldn't be seen as a commodity product.

The keyboard is sturdy and doesn't flex under your fingers, but the keys are still a little small for extended typing unlike the recent HP Mini 1000, which maximizes the surface area of each key (they're about one eighth inch wider on average). The HP aside, the S101's keyboard is on par with recent entries from Dell and Lenovo, except for one painfully frustrating layout decision, the aforementioned right shift key downsize and reorganization.

This seems, at first, like a minor change, but the end result is that you're always hitting the up arrow instead of the shift key, leading to some truly tortured typing experiences. For a journalist who types thousands of words every week, this is a real productivity killer, and over several days, it was nearly impossible to train my hand to move further to the right to hit the tiny shift key. The left shift key is of the correct size and in the traditional position.