The X101H comes nicely packed in a brown 'eco' box, easily opened it contains the netbook, user guide, guarantee and a set of parts that you assemble your mains adaptor which thankfully are not needed as there is also the X101H's battery sitting at the back of the box.
Having purchased the black edition of the sub-£200 machine...
I was pleasantly surprised by the build quality, as expected there is slight flex in the keyboard area and the screen is unprotected; but when shut the machine is a solid bit of kit and the hinges despite being plastic, seem very durable.
Hardware wise its good for the money, the X101H comes pre-equipped with a dual core atom N570 capable of a solid 1.7ghz, 1gb ddr3 ram (upgradable to 2gb) and the Intel GMA 3150. However being a netbook the parts do not run as well as an equivalent desktop and maxed out battery life only lasts for around 4-5 hours. However many low spec games such as minecarft and portal are playable if you can suffer the occasional lag spike and do the ram upgrade.
Ethically the X101H does well, it has a bios 'booster' to speed up POST and copes with startup as expected. The sleep function allows for a power saving mode when you need to get a minute without shutting down.
Unfortunately Asus disappoint when it comes to pre-installed software; you notice Asus' long line of consumer offerings waiting to attack you on your first startup; getting past that there's a trial version of word and some freeware to take up the space. It is probably worth performing a clean install of windows or an upgrade to get rid of such 'bloatware'. Due to the lack of a disk drive this would probably have to be done by one of the X101H's 2 USB 2.0 drives.
The machine also offers access and staorge by its SD card slot, VGA connector for video-out; and a headphone slot. Importantly it has a RJ-45 for high speed connectivity by ethernet.
Overall the machine is comfortable enough for everyday use and if used intended will not under perform; running office, media player and accessing the internet were all done without breaking sweat. It's only a shame the battery life is short as it may lead to it being plugged in most of the time.
Very interesting , however I think i will stick to the samsung!
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