The design aesthetic of everyday PC casing has always been a moot point. While high-end desktop gamers benefit from lurid cooling units and haughty chassis design, laptop cases have been somewhat dour in comparison. The Alienwares of this world produce a case design that catches our eye every now and again, but these tend always to veer a little too much towards the brash than the attractive.
With the S6 series, Asus plans to change all that. Here's a laptop designed not simply to show off the power tucked under the bonnet, but to make the casing a desirable selling point in its own right - and that's not even mentioning the low wattage Core Duo that's tucked inside.
The Asus design team has elected to be sparing in its use of leather, choosing to kit out the back of the screen and the resting area of the keyboard only. And while the chocolate brown option supplied to us from Asus may not be everyone's preferred colour scheme, the pink and crocodile skin options, together with various natural tints, should mean there's something for everyone.
The design of the S6F works very well. The rest of the body is in a sturdy-looking gunmetal grey, which marries well with the dark brown of the leather. If nothing else, the S6F looks every bit as classy as the Mac Book Pro, and could well have Apple aficionados choking on their Mighty Mice.
The trackpad and keyboard layout are well-spaced and also comfortable. But how the S6F looks is only half of its appeal. This, remember, is a high-end portable with an Intel Centrino Duo running at 1.66GHz powering it, and 100GB of storage space available.
Our review model ships with 1GB of DDR2 RAM and sports a VGA port, a quicklaunch button for switching Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on and off, LAN and WLAN, two USB ports, an ExpressCard slot and a memory card reader. Asus hasn't scrimped on the onboard media either, providing an ultra-slim DVD rewriter that, given the S6F's dimensions, must take up a good third of its casing space. It's capable of writing and rewriting CDs at 24x and 16x, and DVDs at 4x.
