Asus W5F-G001P review

Few things grab the attention of the Shopper team like a small and beautifully designed notebook.

There's something special about a compact but fully featured PC, and Asus's W5F-G001P is the latest notebook to attract longing glances. It looks fantastic and also includes one of Intel's new Core Duo processors.

The Intel Core Duo T2400's cores run at 1.83GHz. This gives the little notebook impressive performance in processor-intensive tasks, helping it to score a huge 138 in the video-encoding segment of our new benchmarks. It also managed a very impressive PCMark04 score and did well in Shopper's benchmarks overall. The notebook struggled slightly with our image-editing test, which requires a lot of memory, but an inexpensive upgrade to 1GB of RAM would improve this area massively.

The chassis is well designed and tastefully finished in a very dark grey, with blue LEDs to add a touch of colour. The keyboard is firm to the touch and keys have a decent amount of travel. The touch pad follows Asus's usual design, with the surround and buttons in brushed aluminium. The touch pad itself is small but accurate and has a very light texture to it, which improves tactile feedback.

The 12.1" display is also impressive and displays clean, white, crisp text and well-balanced colours. A gloss finish improves the colour saturation and vibrancy, although this isn't ideal for a portable device that will be used in various lighting conditions, as it increases screen reflections.

Above the display is a 1.3-megapixel webcam, which swivels 180 to face either way. This means you can use it to capture stills or video footage of others. Other useful features include a switch for disabling the wireless adaptor and a handy dedicated volume control on the side. The speakers themselves aren't up to much, and are quiet and trebly.

The sides of the chassis are packed with useful ports and connections. Three USB ports are thoughtfully spread around the chassis for ease of use. There's also a memory card reader with support for SD, MMC and MS cards. This sits directly above the DVD writer, while inside there's a large 80GB hard disk.

The W5F-G001P weighs only 1.7kg, including a large battery pack that extends from the rear of the chassis. This gave it a healthy running time of more than four-and-a-half hours in our light-usage test. It comes with Windows XP Professional installed and a full two-year warranty. It may be expensive, but it's a great portable notebook, and the dual-core technology gives it a long lifespan.