Asus aims high with lifestyle notebook ... the Asus W5Fm

Asus has been in the consumer electronics market for quite a number of years now, designing and manufacturing high quality gadgets and electronic gear, I would certainly know because I have one of their Centrino Notebooks M6000 series a multimedia notebook, it was reliable, powerful and came with many extras like a tough durable bag, mouse and many inclusive software. However I found that the M6000 series became a bit cumbersome, it was a 15" WXGA and weighed in at about 2.6Kg. As you can imagine, lugging that around with you all day plus the bag, power cables and the rest was somewhat painful on the shoulders, afterall it was a multimedia notebook.

This year I decided that I needed a new smaller, lighter and just as powerful notebook. I took many days looking through many brands... Toshiba, Sharp, Sony, NEC, Lenovo, Mac!! In the end I thought why did I bother looking at other brands when I had a great experience using the Asus notebook. I looked through the 12" notebook catalogue and saw the W5Fm.

The W5Fm is part of the W5 series with 12" WXGA TFT screen and with built-in camera that swivels 180 degrees and uses Windows Vista. It is classed as a ultra mobile notebook that is fully featured for digital lifestyle. It weighs 1.6Kg and measures 305 x 220 x 31, so it is one of the most portable notebooks on the market. The W5Fm offers and ideal blend of performance, portability and features. 

There were a few models in the W5 series some with more features, different colours and different processor specs.
The W5A uses an Intel Centrino processor, the W5F uses a Core Duo and the W5Fm and W5Fe has the ability to use the Core2Duo T7xxx processors. For more information on the W5 series visit Asus website.

This is an ultra portable multimedia notebook which has bluetooth, built-camera, wireless LAN, built-in mic. In this review the W5Fm that I purchased has a Core2Duo T7200 (2GHz) processor, 1Gb DDR2-667 RAM, Intel GMA950 graphics, 120Gb HDD, DVD-/+RW DL, 12.1" WXGA. There are many optional extras available but this was enough for me.

There are a few classes of notebooks but the main ones are "Desktop Replacement" and the "Ultra Portable".

The desktop replacement notebooks are essentially an all-in-one PC but in a size of a big notebook usually with 15" widescreen or bigger. Most or all of these desktop replacement are too big and heavy to carry around all day, hence the category name, but it allows you to relocate to another part of the room or location easily in one go.

Ultra portables are the essentials of a PC in a smaller and lighter notebook that are below the 13" screen size. The weight of these ultra portables notebooks are usually below 2kg. However, with advancing technologies additional multimedia devices were are to be built-in to these ultra portable notebooks. You can carry these ultra portable for hours and days and work in any confined spaces like planes, trains and coaches.

Some say notebooks are very limited when it comes to expansion. That's true to a certain extent. However, what we use the notebook for ... is subject to the user himself/herself. Someone who just want to surf the web, check emails or IM their buddies, will not need any extra upgrades as such. But for business user or a high performance/multimedia professional, then a suitable notebook with expansion capabilities would be better suited.

Most notebooks will have an expansion slot for extra memory, some have a removeable cover to upgrade the hard drive. The processor is usually fixed, but for high-end notebooks, there's sometimes an option to upgrade the processor as well.

Access to the W5Fm components such as memory, hard disk, processor was easy but it has only one memory expansion slot, disapointingly its was already occupied by 512Mb RAM stick hence making up 1Gb of memory.

OK, let's waste any more time and check out the specifications of the Asus W5Fm ...