Asus Eee PC S101: fashion comes with a higher price

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Playing with a thin Lenovo X301 this morning reminded me of a reader tip about the new thin-and-light Eee PC notebook from Asus. AllanCJ pinged me about the new Asus S101 which is a morphs the Eee line into a higher end, fashionable device. $699 is the starting price when we see it later this month or early next, and I think the question will be: how will consumers look at the S101 from a price, performance and portability triangle.

What I mean by that is in terms of compromises. As portability or performance increases, so too does price. The S101 is priced higher than the rest of the Eee PC line, but at 2.2-pounds and 1.8-centimeters thick might be easier to tote. Not by much though: my MSI Wind starts at 19mm and works its way up. The Guardian suggests that the 10.2-inch display supports up to 1024×768 resolution which is better than the relatively standard 1024×600 most netbooks offer today. Unfortunately, Asus’s press release debunks that hope: it’s the same WSVGA most of us are used to seeing in a netbook.

So aside from the fashion and price difference, what’s new? Not a whole heck of a lot, which is unfortunately becoming common in the Eee PC line. There will be SSD options at 16-, 32- and 64GB for storage, integrated 802.11n and I see that the 36 W/hr battery is a polymer-based power pack. Plus there’s the webcam that actually uses a lower resolution sensor than several of the Eee’s before it: just 0.3-megapixels. Can’t we have function and fashion with our price, performance and portability?

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