The first Sonoma we got to test was the elegant pearl-white Asus W5A. Undoubtedly a good looker, the top-end 2.13GHz processor does no harm in boosting processing power. There are abundant features such as a built-in receiver supporting wireless mice and a nifty swiveling Web cam on the screen. Though battery life is a let-down, Asus has done a pretty good job in turning out a solid machine. ...

Read first take of the Asus W5A »

By Stephen Tong
Feb 7, 2005

The first Sonoma we got to test was the elegant pearl-white Asus W5A. Undoubtedly a good looker, the top-end 2.13GHz processor does no harm in boosting processing power. There are abundant features such as a built-in receiver supporting wireless mice and a nifty swiveling Web cam on the screen. Though battery life is a let-down, Asus has done a pretty good job in turning out a solid machine.

View the Asus W5A photo gallery

Editors' note: As our test unit was a pre-production model, some of the specs may differ from the actual retail W5A. As such, you may see updates to this review as soon as we test out a retail set. The Asus W5A will be available at the end of February and will come in two colors. The white unit's price is tentatively set at S$3,698 (US$2,661.96) (750 processor (1.86GHz), 80GB HDD, DVD±RW drive and Win XP Pro) while the black is set at S$3,398 (US$2,446.01) (740 processor (1.73GHz), 60GB HDD, DVD/CD-RW combo and Win XP Home). Please check with your local distributor for more information. 16/02/05: Adjustments were made to the rating as the W5A is deemed a thin-and-light rather than an ultraportable.

The Asus W5A offers a 1.3 megapixel CMOS camera that swivels two directions.

Design
Asus' featherweight thin-and-light appears to have the same white veneer as the stylish S5NE. The compact white beauty has a 275 x 235 x 29.8mm frame weighing 1.55kg without the battery (1.8kg with a 4800mAh Lithium-ion cell). Sporting a reflective 12.1-inch widescreen, the W5A features a hingeless lid with a 1.3 megapixel camera which can be swiveled 180 degrees. It wasn't too easy pivoting the camera with one hand and we found the lack of a cover a little disturbing as a stray finger could smudge the lens easily. The right of the screen is lined with a record, zoom button along with an inbuilt mic. The speakers are integrated just below the screen, immediately speaking volumes about the poor sound quality.

The keyboard is well-spaced, delivering good tactile feedback to satisfy us. Curiously, the touchpad protrudes slightly and is pleasantly made of the same material as the white chassis. Two not-too-responsive aluminum mouse keys line the bottom and no scroller is seen, which is characteristic of most Asus models. There're no quick launch buttons though the Wi-Fi switch lies on the top left along with an interesting button which toggles between power settings. A pleasing blue backlight illuminates the Power button when the machine is turned on.

There's only a single RAM slot as seen on the top right.

Features
Our test unit came loaded in the top configuration possible for the W5A. This included the new Pentium M processor 770 (2.13GHz) with a 533MHz front-side bus speed, though you have a choice of a Pentium M 730 (1.6GHz) to 770 (2.13GHz) processor. There's support for DDR2 RAM though the maximum RAM allowed a pitiful 768MB which came with the W5A. We got a somewhat noisy 4,200rpm 80GB drive with 30GB to 80GB options.

The unit uses Intel's new integrated Media Accelerator 900 Graphics, supporting up to 128MB of shared memory--an improvement over the old Intel Extreme Graphics which shared up to 64MB. The unit incorporates 802.11b/g wireless LAN, Bluetooth, Fast Ethernet and a 56K modem, which bode well for connectivity though there's no infrared.

Expandability options are abundant. You get a whole range of ports such as three well-spaced USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, S-video out, VGA-out, a Type II PC Card slot and even a handy SD/MMC/MS/MS-Pro card reader. The optical drive bay is filled with a 9.5mm inbuilt DVD±RW burner on the left edge.

In addition, the W5A supports certain wireless Logitech mice thanks to its built-in 27MHz RF receiver. We tested the unit with the Logitech Cordless Optical Mouse for Notebooks with a matching white design which worked pretty well though clicking was not too responsive.

A pleasing blue backlight illuminates the Power button.

Performance And Battery Life
We were eager to run MobileMark 2002 for obvious reasons. Being the fastest mobile Intel processor in the market was a key factor. The results did not disappoint as a high 240 performance score was obtained, pipping other notebooks in its lightweight category. It remains to be seen how the Asus will fare among its peers with the same processor.

Though we weren't expecting anything in the range of the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700s for 3D rendering, the Intel Media Accelerator 900 Graphics marked an improvement over the Intel Extreme Graphics. Running 3DMark2001 SE at 1,024 x 768 resolution, we obtained a rating of 4,808 for the W5A, which almost doubles the usual 2,000 to 2,500 scores we get for the older integrated graphics.

The results from the battery life tests were far from impressive. Better performance usually comes at the expense of a lower battery rating, and so it proved thus. A full cycle churned out a sub-average 189 minutes from the 4800mAh Lithium-ion cell compared with other thin-and-lights squeezing 200 to 250 minutes. However, we may adjust this number when we conduct a battery test on a Lithium cell of a retail unit.

Service And Support
The two-year limited global warranty includes both parts and service which will definitely appeal to the traveling group of mobile professionals. According to Asus, the average turnaround time for repairs is about two days if the replacement parts are readily available. Its Singapore Web site is very outdated and so we'd definitely recommend you to visit the global site if you want to download drivers, utilities or manuals for the notebook. You can expect the W5A downloads to be available as soon as the product is launched. For customer service you can go visit the Singapore service center in Adelphi.

The machine came preloaded with Windows XP Professional Edition along with useful Asus proprietary utilities. Among them was Asus LifeFrame to be used in tandem with camera/video recording. There was also Power4 Gear which configures your power settings to optimize your machine. As this was a test unit, the full suite of software was not available so we were limited to certain applications. Look out for updates on this review in the coming weeks.

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