Exterior Features
The ASUS U6S is a nice looking machine – the back of the LCD is a very glossy brown-ish color with bright metallic speckles in it that shine when hit by the light correctly.

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Showing those color accents was pretty much impossible for me, and even getting the brown color to stand out was difficult.  I should note that the brown color is not in anyway displeasing to look at and is much nicer than the Microsoft Zune brown that you may be familiar with. 

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The battery of the U6S (6-cells) does stick out the back of the notebook; a trend that is more common in ultra-mobile notebooks than most realize.  There is an optional 3-cell battery that sits flush with the U6S I’ll show later.

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The bottom of the machine holds the access to things like the hard drive, memory expansion and screws to allow removal of the optical drive.  Under the large panel on the right hand side you’ll find the single heatpipe system that cools the CPU, GPU and chipset all with a single side vent fan. 

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Click to Enlarge

Opening up the U6S we see the brown color pattern continued with a leather wrist-rest along each side of the center oriented touch pad.  The screen has a larger bezel on it than necessary for the 12.1″ screen size, but that extra width allowed ASUS to include a larger keyboard which many people should appreciate. 

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The LED back-lit LCD screen gives the U6S a very thin top that remained rigid during many openings and closings unlike some reports of the very first LED screen in notebooks. 

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Starting the panaramic views on the right hand side, the U6S sports a DVD-RW drive below a memory card reader that supports SD, MMC and Memorystick Pro cards.  Behind that is the standard headphone output and microphone input jacks followed by a single USB connection and the security connection.

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On the opposite side, to the left of the notebook, we see the power connection and then the relatively large exhaust port.  There are three more USB connections for a total of four (eat that Apple) as well as an HDMI output (!!) and a physical WiFi on/off switch that many people will love to see.  Also, there is a Express Card slot above it for expansion.

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The back of the system doesn’t hold a lot thanks to the extended battery though a standard VGA output is seen on the right and both the modem and Gigabit networking connections are seen on the left. 

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Finally, on the front, there is only a single, mono speaker output seen on the right hand side and that’s it.

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