ASUS W5A

We love a notebook that dares to be different. The four-pound ASUS W5A avoids the standard silver-and-black look in favor of a cool white housing that gives the notebook a very clean iBook-like aesthetic. The W5A provides plenty of performance, along with a crisp widescreen display, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. This sexy system’s versatility makes it well suited for both students and business travelers willing to spend a little more to stand out from the crowd.

The W5A’s second most unique feature is the swiveling Webcam above the display, which will help you stay in touch with colleagues or family members using your video chat or conferencing application of choice. The system features a built-in microphone for use with the Webcam and Lifeframe software for capturing, recording, and playing photos and videos.

The camera captures video at up to 640 x 480 pixels, which we found to be pretty choppy. Video was smooth at 320 x 240 resolution. The camera can be used as a security device, snapping photos whenever it detects motion. The installed ASUS Video Security utility can stream a video feed to a remote PC over the Internet. The Webcam’s 1.3-megapixel still photos look better than what the average camera phone is capable of capturing.

We enjoyed the W5A’s bright screen. It measures a scant 12.1-inches diagonally, but you can get away with working in Word or Excel if you’re willing to zoom the view of your pages up to 150 percent. With its 1280 x 800-pixel WXGA widescreen resolution, this display proved ideal for watching DVD movies on the go. When you get to your hotel, you’ll appreciate the front-firing speaker beneath the display, which is louder than what you’ll find on most ultraportables.

The W5A flies through productivity applications, thanks to its 1.7-GHz Pentium M 740 processor with 512MB of DDR2 memory. We edited images in Photoshop, compressed files with WinZip, and encoding MP3s in Windows Media Player without a hiccup. MobileMark agreed with our assessment, giving the W5A an above-average score of 232.

With 3 hours and 15 minutes of battery life, you should be able to get a decent amount of work done before you’ll have to find a power outlet. Whether you’re on the road, at home, or at the office, you’ll appreciate the W5A’s 802.11b/g adapter, which offers pretty good wireless networking performance. Its 12.2-Mbps data rate at 50 feet from the access point is better than average for thin-and-light notebooks.

If you’re into digital photography, you’ll like the W5A’s SD/MMC/Memory Stick reader. It gives you an easy way to get images from your digital camera onto the notebook. The FireWire port can transfer footage from a digital camcorder, and the installed copy of PowerDirector gives you the tools to edit your movies.

Unfortunately, the system doesn’t come with a DVD burner, or even the option to upgrade to one, which limits your storage potential. The hard drive itself isn’t great, either. Beyond being a relatively small 40GB model, it spins at only 4,200 rpm and has a small 2MB cache memory buffer, which limits disk access speeds. We noticed that applications were a bit slow to load.

The W5A uses the video adapter integrated into the Intel 915GM core logic chipset, but even so, it proved a capable machine for handling 3D games. We played Halo and found the graphic detail to be suprisingly good, with fairly fluid motion when we had the game set at the lowest resolution.  This system earned a 3DMark2001 score of 4,546, which is slightly above average for the ultraportable weight class.

Other features include a nylon case, a Wi-Fi On/Off switch, a hard-wired volume control, a comfortable full-sized keyboard, and an ASUS-branded Logitech Cordless Optical Mouse for Notebooks that matches the white casing of the W5A. There’s not much software included aside from a few ASUS utilities and some multimedia applications, but the system is backed by a strong two-year warranty. Too bad the toll-free tech support is during business hours only.

The ASUS W5A offers excellent performance, decent battery life, and a nifty Webcam in a slick-looking package that’s very travel-friendly. The lack of a DVD burner is a bummer, but this notebook is sure to turn heads.