Ergh...

...with at best 1/7th the 3D performance of my 17" Sager, it'd have to be hellishly cheap to justify.

Utterly pointless screen

There are two points to a 16:9 screen on a computer.

1) To match the aspect ratio of HDTV for video playback.

2) To save money, because a 16:9 screen has less area than a 16:10 screen with the same diagonal.

So what they've done here is charge a reasonably large amount of money for a machine with an inferior resolution to any 1680x1050 screen (let alone WUXGA), that has an inferior aspect ratio for document editing (try fitting two A4 pages on it - 16:10 is much better), and that can't display HD resolutions without scaling (blurring) them.

Personally, I've never found black bars (aka "somewhere off-screen to put the DVD player control) distracting - certainly no more than the screen boundaries. I'll be amused if someone starts doing ambilight-esque coloured borders. This is entirely a cynical attempt to fob off a cheaper panel than a "real" 17" screen would have been, and claim it's superior.

16:9 is not, and never has been, a good choice of aspect ratio. Now it's polluting our laptop screens. Eugh.

Pint glass, for looking at distorted images through.

Going blind?

Yep - This is the other laptop to complement your eeepc 901. When you need more memory/cpu/disk/workspace for real work.

Which is why it is disappointing to see it only has 1600x900 resolution. Using a similar dpi to the 901 you should be looking at 1920x1080 (which would also make it true HD). Given that Asus has dropped the dpi for its successor eeepc models - are they going blind (to the market). Come on Asus, recapture the market by being truly innovative.