One of the first things you notice about the Eee PC S101 is that it looks different from earlier Eee PCs. A lot more effort has gone into styling compared with the stark white of models such as the Eee PC 900, which looked somewhat like an engineering sample rather than a finished product. Three colours are available, ours coming in a kind of pearlescent brown effect.

The keyboard of this model is good, with well-spaced keys and a full set of function keys forming the top row of the keyboard. Our only quibble is that we kept hitting the up arrow key instead of the right shift key because of the positioning of the two. The touchpad appears to have just a single button, but depressing either end causes a left or right mouse click as you might expect.

Just below the screen are two further buttons. One is for power, the other for the Asus Super Hybrid Engine, designed to optimise the power use of the system. The button cycles through three modes: super performance, high performance and power saving, plus a fourth option of automatic.

The 10.2in screen makes good use of the available space and offers a resolution of 1024 x 600. This gave a perfectly acceptable display, although we had to scroll up and down a lot when viewing web pages.

For connectivity, the Eee PC S101 has an 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, 10/100 Ethernet port and Bluetooth 2.0. The wireless interfaces can be turned on and off using Fn + F2 on the keyboard, and users should note that Windows does not seem to be aware of their status; when Wi-Fi is disabled, it simply reports that no wireless networks can be found, for example.

The remaining I/O consists of three USB ports, audio jack sockets, external VGA and a 4-in-1 slot for MMC, SD Card, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro Flash cards. Oddly, the Flash slot is at the rear right of the case, rather than the front or one of the sides. Our review model came with a 16GB SD Card.

Software installed on the Eee PC S101 included two suites - Microsoft Works and StarOffice 8 - plus InterVideo WinDVD, Skype, Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Asus also provides a tool to update the system firmware.

Overall, we liked the quality feel of the Eee PC S101, and found it a convenient system to carry around and use for work during our tests. However, with many comparable systems costing around £300, some buyers may find its £449 price tag too high to justify.