Asus W5Fe review

Asus has a track record of releasing innovative laptops. We've seen gaming laptops with flashing lights, ultraportables with leather finishes, and glossy, super-light laptops that will have you swooning from 20 paces.

Its latest endeavour takes advantage of SideShow, one of Windows Vista's most dramatic new features. The W5Fe features a standard 12-inch screen, but more interestingly there's an auxiliary external display that can be used to view images, access audio, review emails and more, without you having to switch the laptop on.

Design
The W5Fe's most exciting feature is definitely the SideShow display. We like to think of it as a giant PDA welded to the lid of the laptop. It has 1GB of flash memory and runs a slimmed-down version of the Windows operating system, which runs mini-applications known as 'gadgets'. They're all designed to fit on the 71mm (2.8-inch), 320x240-pixel display that juts out of a mound at the top of the laptop.

The SideShow screen in all its gadgety glory

Out of the box, gadgets include a music player, the confusingly-named SlideShow player for browsing pictures, a battery-status indicator and a Windows Mail inbox viewer. The latter doesn't fetch new emails, but having access to old messages can be useful. It's possible to add new gadgets, or to create your own if you're handy with the C++ language and have the appropriate software-development kit.

The keys you need for controlling the gadgets are located next to the display. There's a four-way cursor button for scrolling through the menu system and self-explanatory menu, on/off and back buttons -- it's all laid out in an intuitive manner, so you shouldn't be too baffled when you first see it.

The rest of the W5Fe is fairly compact. It's comparable in size to a large Filofax and is pretty portable, thanks to its 1.7kg chassis.

Nothing stands out as being unusual inside. There's a Wi-Fi switch for activating the wireless features and a PowerGear 4 button for cycling through the laptop's various battery life or speed-promoting power modes.

What are different are the shortcut keys along the right bezel of the display. These let you activate or deactivate the microphone and rotatable webcam, which sits atop the screen.

We like W5Fe's comfortable keyboard, and the logical layout of its various ports. Unlike most laptops, whose USB ports sit side by side or are stacked one on top of the other, the W5Fe has an individual port on the left, right and rear of the laptop. This makes it easier to connect more than one USB peripheral, particularly if they're quite bulky.

The shortcut buttons for the Webcam are an unusual addition

Features
Is SideShow a good thing? The jury's still out. The main problem is it can't access information on your hard disk when the laptop is off -- instead it syncs certain information when you turn it on. It's a pain because if you haven't remembered to sync the music you want, you're stuffed until you turn the laptop on again.

The only use we found for it was checking emails (once we'd already received them) using the Windows Mail Inbox gadget, although what we really want is something that can check our live email accounts for anything new. We didn't find viewing images or playing MP3 files all that useful. It's possible to install new gadgets by visiting the Vista Gadget Gallery Web site, but at the time of writing we couldn't find anything of interest.