The Asus Eee PC X101 is a the thinnest 10 inch netbook Asus has released to date. It's also the cheapest. The little notebook is available for as little as $199. In order to keep costs low, Asus loads the netbook with MeeGo Linux instead of Windows, uses a 1.33 GHz Intel Atom N435 processor instead of a faster chip, and offers just 8GB of storage using inexpensive flash memory. The netbook also comes with a 3 cell, 28Whr battery.
But despite those compromises, or perhaps because of them, the Eee PC X101 is one of the most interesting netbooks to come along in years. It's not another cookie cutter machine. It bucks the Windows 7 Starter trend, for instance, by shipping with an alternate operating system — at the risk of confusing some users. It foregoes a large hard drive for a small amount of storage, encouraging users to store their data in the cloud.
I got a chance to play with an X101 for a few minutes this evening, and in some ways it feels like the obvious evolution of the earliest Asus netbooks. It's thinner, lighter, and gets better battery life than the Eee PC 701 or Eee PC 900 for instance.
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