ASUS S1 Mobile Pentium III-M 1.2GHz

The front of the S1 is home to four more status LEDs as well as the system's audio jacks. Above and to the right of the 3.8mm microphone in and headphones out jacks are three of the systems LEDs. Here one can find the power LED, which glows green when the system is on and blinks green when in standby, the battery LED, which glows orange when charging and goes off when charged, and the mail indicator LED, which can be set to glow when new mail is received. Located on the far right front side of the S1 is a fourth LED. This LED is to indicate wireless connectivity but in our system it did nothing as no internal wireless hardware was included.

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The left side of the S1 is home to a variety of components that, because of space restrictions, could not be located on the back. Behind the window most towards the front of the system is the S1's IR port. To the left of the IR port are two USB v1.1 ports mounted horizontally side by side. One step over from that is a 4-pin unpowered IEE-1394 port followed by the S1's single type II PCMCIA card. Naturally, in a system this size, real-estate is at a premium and therefore two PCMCIA slots would have been out of the question. Next to the PCMCIA slot, covered by a plastic flap, is ASUS' AiBOX 50-pin connector that provides for the attachment of an IDE drive. Our unit came with a DVD/CD-RW (8x8x24) drive but other solutions, such as a hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, and a DVD-ROM drive, are also available. The final item on the S1's left side is the DC-in jack.

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The remainder of the ASUS S1's ports are located on the back of the system. The back right side is home to a Kensington lock port located to the right of the ASUS' PortBar II 69-pin connector. This connector is used to hook up the PortBar II accessory, ASUS' port replicator. To the left of the PortBar II connector is a 15 pin VGA-out port. Next up are two connectivity ports: an ethernet port and a modem jack. The final port on the S1's rear is another USB port, bringing the total number of USB ports on the system up to three. The back left side of the S1 is also home to the exhaust for the CPU fan.

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The right side of the S1 is rather bare, containing only the intake port for the CPU cooling fan.

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The bottom of the S1 is home to only one access panel but also houses access to the hard drive, the speaker, and the CPU fan. The small cutout at the front right of the S1's bottom is where the unit's single speaker lies. Due to size constraints, ASUS was able to only squeeze one speaker into the S1. The large area on the system's left side is where the battery is located. Easily popped out by sliding the two tabs towards one another, removing the battery also provides access to the units hard drive. The hard drive is located to the right of the battery bay but can be removed by sliding it out of the system while the battery is out. A simple lift of a handle provided all the access we needed to the S1's hard drive.

Above the battery is the system's fan and air intake. Finally, the access panel in the middle of the system is a cover to the memory expansion slot. Only one slot is visible and in our system the slot was populated with one stick of 128MB PC133 SDRAM.

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The warmest part of the S1 was directly behind the exhaust port on the rear of the system. We were able to get this part of the notebook up to 138.0 degrees Fahrenheit (58.8 degrees Celsius) during our testing. Temperatures not involving air blowing directly out of the system were somewhat milder, around 130.0 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius) at the warmest part of the S1's bottom.

When the size specifications of the S1 are examined there remains no question that the unit is in the thin-and-light notebook class. The S1 measures a comfortable 11.7" x 9.4" x 1.1" and weighs only 3.9 pounds with battery. Much more portable, and easier on the back, than the other mobile solutions we have seen in the past.