Asus S6F Leather Notebook

Asus off late is seemingly on the forefront of the enthusiast market, and is also making impressive moves in the lifestyle market. Their products are very expensive, but unlike offerings from other manufacturers, Asus delivers above average performance and sleek looks. The product reviewed below is the Asus S6F, an 11.1 inch leather-clad ultra-portable laptop.

We have got to hand it over to Asus. They really know how to make their PC products look stylish and sturdy at the same time. The S6F for its diminutive size is one of the best looking products we have ever seen. The laptop’s top panel and the area around the touchpad are embossed in hand-crafted leather which makes for a style statement par none. The leather finishing is available in various natural tints and shades of either camel-colored or rich dark brown. Both these shades look enticingly good, much like the handcrafted leather that one would see in a stately car like a Bentley or a Rolls-Royce.

The body of the laptop has been colored in a gun-metal/brushed metal shade to keep the leather look consistent. This includes the whole area around the LCD panel, hinges on the front side and the color of the keyboard itself. The innovative use of color adds to the luster and appeal of the laptop.

Physically the laptop is as tiny as it comes. It weighs in at an almost negligible 1.37 Kg and sports an 11.1 inch screen. The LCD panel at the back is reinforced by a pair of thick round shiny circular hinges. The plastic used in the construction of the laptop is pretty sturdy and lightweight. Overall the laptop is well designed and in fact the only competitors in this range that bring out small form factor laptops are are the Sony Vaio TX range.
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The S6F in keeping with its tiny built has a small keyboard. Asus has claimed that this keyboard is only about 92 percent the size of a standard keyboard. It is fairly cramped and it will take you a few days to get used to. Luckily once you get past the fact that it is cramped, the keyboard is eminently usable and you will be able to achieve decent typing speeds. The keys are smooth with just the right bit of elevation and cause no user fatigue. The only annoying thing we noticed here was a problem that has spilled over from the larger Lamborghini series i.e. placement of certain crucial system keys. In this case the function key has been swapped with the ctrl-key. With the function key now being where the ctrl-key should be it leads to mistakes when you are performing mundane tasks such as copy-pasting.

The LCD panels on Asus laptops continue to be among the best in the industry.The 11.1 inch panel used on the S6F is a widescreen panel with a resolution of 1366x768 (16:9 aspect ratio). It sports the splendid video enhancement technology that is present in the Asus PW201. The laptop allows you to set pre-defined modes which vary the color, contrast and brightness. The colors and brightness leaps out at you. An added advantage of the 16:9 resolution is the fact that you can watch DVDs in their native resolution without the added black borders that surface on most LCD panels.

The touchpad of the Asus S6F is a standard affair. It provides good traction and allows for fairly accurate mouse control. The touchpad like the keyboard is also a bit cramped, so if you do plan to use the laptop as your main computing platform, you would be better off investing in a good external laptop mouse. As we have already mentioned before, Asus has managed to slip in an 8X dual-layer DVD writer which really adds fantastic value to the laptop. The drive is carefully placed on the right hand side and does not look out of place.

For a small laptop, the S6F is certainly well equipped. Asus unlike other manufacturers has managed to actually squeeze in an 8X dual-format DVD burner into the S6F’s tiny frame. In terms of connectivity the S6F includes 3 USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire port, Gigabit LAN connectivity, 802.11a/b/g Wireless and Bluetooth connectivity with dedicated controls for disabling and enabling them. An interesting point to note here is that, two of the USB ports along with the LAN modem and audio ports are hidden inside a drop-down panel on the left hand side of the laptop. This is a move we approve off, as it maintains the
sleek lines of the laptop without eliminating these vital ports.
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Specification Table

The S6F is not only a good looking laptop but a polished performer too.The S6F packs in a Low Voltage Core Duo processor namely the L2400 which comes in at a clock speed of 1.662 GHz, has 1 GB of PC4300 (DDR2 533 MHz) system memory and capacious 100 GB HDD. The graphics is handled by an Intel GMA950 chip. Overall these are very healthy specifications for an ultra-portable device.

For testing the performance of the S6F we divided our tests into two sections. We ran it through PCMark 2006 for gauging system performance and for our battery tests we used Battery Eater Pro 2.70. We also ran the laptop through a standard series of real life battery tests.

On PCMark the S6F was able to achieve a rather commendable score of 3100. The score could have been a lot higher, if a dedicated graphics solution such as the Nvidia’s GeForce 7400 Go series had been used. Despite the lack of dedicated 3d Graphics, the Intel GMA 950 is not a bad graphics chip and is Vista Premium ready.On our battery tests the laptop really showed its pedigree. The S6F, with its 5200 mAh battery was able to easily achieve 4 hrs of battery life on non intensive tests and 3 hours 45 minutes on very intensive use. These are very enviable figures for an Ultra-portable of this size.

Asus in its usual no-nonsense manner has come up with a winner here. If you are a person whose life consists of relaxed board meetings, teeing off at the golf course for lunch and travelling to work in a helicopter well the Asus S6F priced at Rs 1,10000 is just the thing for you. For the rest of us, we can only watch this product from a distance and dream of days when we can hope to actually own it.