A good friend of mine owns an 11-inch Asus laptop and I’m very impressed with the build quality on that thing. That would explain part of the appeal of the Asus Eee PC, because a budget $400 laptop elsewhere might have loose hinges and less than stellar components. Following in the company’s tradition of making high quality laptops, the Asus U6Ep notebook looks like it would be perfect for road warriors and mobile bloggers.

Featuring a 12.1-inch widescreen and an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor (2.6GHz), the U6Ep combines the power of a larger laptop with the convenience of a smaller form factor. Other features include a biometric fingerprint reader for security, Intel GM965 Express chipset, Intel GMA X3100 graphics, integrated Bluetooth, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. Storage comes by way of a 160GB hybrid drive that gets backed up with 256MB of Flash. This is meant to provide better performance when loading data.

No word on pricing, but based on other Asus lappies, the U6Ep probably won’t be all that cheap.