Having gone to the trouble of shrinking the laptop down to the diminutively sized Asus Eee PC 701, it seems Asus is now bent on reversing the trend. First netbooks swelled to 8.9in with the Eee PC 901, then 10in with the 1000, now Asus is going even further and ballooning to 12.1in with the Eee PC S121.
It's the follow up to the "high end" and frankly gorgeous, 10in S101, and brings the genre to just a shade under the MacBook Air's 13.3in frame. Purists may mock the screen size but inside lies the beating heart of a bog standard netbook. Germany's Eee PC News, which broke these close-up shots, says firm specs are still hard to come by but it'll be largely based on the current S101.
That netbook packs a standard 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB RAM and an option of either a 16GB or 32GB SSD. Much of the styling looks similar too, with that delightful "mocha brown" finish and those questionable Swarovski crystals perched on the end of each hinge.
From the looks of it the bigger frame has allowed the inclusion of a larger keyboard from the one the S101 borrowed from the Eee PC 1000 but again there are no official details. All should be revealed at CES. We await with interest.