Moving on from the LCD panel, the rest of the laptop is of rather standard design. The main LCD panel on the W5FE is quite well designed; being 12.1 inches in size has a native resolution of 1280x800. Though it’s not of the same quality as other Asus efforts, it does offer good brightness and contrast. One area however it does suffer in is the lack of a good viewing angle. The screen is transreflective but unlike a normal Asus monitor, this does not work as advertised. We found that working in a bright atmosphere, the screen would often dull a little too much and in some situations we found ourselves squinting to read the screen. The keyboard of the W5Fe however was a delight to use. It had properly elevated keys and provided good tactile feedback. While it was not the full size one is normally used to, it was a lot better than most of the keyboards we have used on other ultra-portables.
In its connectivity options, the laptop is quite well equipped. It has 3 USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, S-Video and VGA outputs, one PC Express Card slot, and a 4-in-1 card reader. Its wireless connectivity includes 802.11a/b/g support, Bluetooth and the standard RJ11/RJ45 jacks for gigabit Ethernet and V92 phone connectivity. The only irritating fact that we noticed here was the lack of 802.11n support. Keeping in mind that this machine is based on the Centrino Duo platform, leaving out 802.11n is just bizarre.


