A large touchpad sits in the expanse of brushed metal wrist-rest (another nice design touch) and this is colour-matched to the lid. It supports the same two-finger multi-touch gestures as other Eee PCs, so you can slide two fingers across it for scrolling, and so on. There’s just a single wide mouse button, but it clicks positively at each end.

The 10.2in screen is the same size and 1024 x 600 resolution as on the Asus N10, but the S101’s smaller frame makes it look much more at home here. There’s still a 20mm strip of plastic around all four sides, but this is flat rather than scalloped (as on the N10). The screen also has a matte finish, which means it’s usable under a wider range of lighting conditions than the N10’s glossy display. There isn’t much to say about image quality – it’s the same as on other Eee PCs, which is to say it’s clear, bright and generally pretty good.

It’s a little disappointing that Asus hasn’t taken the “high-end” notion a little further and fitted the Eee PC S101 with a higher resolution screen. That said, there really isn’t room in the lid for a much larger panel and simply cramming more pixels into a 10.2in diagonal wouldn’t achieve much.

So, Asus’ high-end pretensions for the Eee PC S101 don’t extend much beyond its exterior design – inside is the same 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor used in its other Eee PCs (not that there’s another Atom option at the moment). It has sorted out the storage though, and instead of two different size SSDs to make life difficult, the S101 has a single solid-state drive – either 16Gb or 32Gb. (There are reports of a 64Mb SSD too, but we’ve yet to confirm this.)

The SSD capacity depends on the operating system – Windows XP gets 16Gb, Linux gets 32Gb. As with Asus’ other Eee PCs, this is the result of the operating systems’ differing licensing terms – Linux is free, which leaves more budget for a bigger drive. It is unfortunate that the operating system that needs the most storage gets the smaller drive, but of course there’s nothing to stop you buying the Linux model and installing Windows yourself.

Asus still leads the netbook pack by some margin when it comes to battery life, thanks to the high-capacity cells supplied with its Atom-powered Eee PCs. Happily, the Eee PC S101 continues the trend and its 4900mAh cell stretched to 3 hours and forty-five minutes in Battery Eater’s heavy-use test, and just over five hours in light-use (Wi-Fi off and screen at mid-brightness, in both cases).

Performance from the 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor and 1Gb of RAM is much the same as Asus’ other Atom-powered Eee PCs, but the Eee PC S101 does run very quietly. We didn’t get the opportunity to open it up to see if there’s a fan inside, but if there is, it’s a silent one.