The Eee PC T91 is ASUS’ first full touchscreen tablet netbook and it is finally making its own way onto the United States retail market. Touchscreen tablets have been, in many ways, an oft-repeated mix of excitement and disappointment – great ideas coupled with mediocre hardware, or nice-looking hardware coupled with bad implementation of the touchscreen. Has ASUS managed to sidestep these issues with its own tablet PC?
- Hardware and Specifications
The Eee PC T91 is an 8.9-incher, which means you’ll have a small keyboard even by many netbook standards. Surprisingly, it is easy to type on this one. It got a nice clickiness, and while it is certainly compact, it does not feel cramped, and we really didn’t experience more mistyping than average – which was, to be honest, a pleasant surprise. The trackpad is responsive and on par with other netbook pads. The backlit LED resistive touch panel is quite bright and nice looking. The netbook boasts a VGA, two USB, and two audio ports, and it’s got a power button right on the left bottom edge of the screen. Directly to the right of the power button is another button on the bezel, which is one of the ways to activate the touch interface. The T91 also has an expandable stylus housed under the right bottom side of the chasis.
Spec-wise, the Eee PC T91 has a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU, and if you’re accustomed to a more standard netbook configuration with an N270 or N280, you’ll definitely feel the difference. It also has 1GB of RAM, Intel GMA500 graphics, a 16GB SSD and a lithium polymer battery rated for about 5 hours of power. It also got 802.11 B/G/N Wi-Fi, 10/100Mbps Ethernet, and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR.
- Software and Performance
The T91 has an easy, 9-point calibration process to get the touchscreen properly responsive. ASUS has also loaded the T91 with some custom-built software – namely the Touch Gate interface. From the regular XP desktop, you can activate the touchscreen interface three ways – via the icon on the desktop, the slider icon at the top of the desktop, or that physical button to the right of the power toggle. Hitting any of those brings up the Touch Gate main interface – which is essentially a very simple row of icons that can be rearranged in any order – with up to five icons in the mail row, and others behind it. For now, there is a limited amount of icons on the list – preferences, and four custom-built apps – Fotofun, Memos, Notepad, and Internet Explorer with Touch Capability. We should say that we find the interface to be really clean and pleasing to look at, and the applications are pretty elegantly designed.
- Wrap Up
Overall, the software included with the T91 is really nicely designed, and operates pretty much as advertised. There are limitations to the CPU and the resistive touchscreen – we had to move a bit slower than we liked or our touches did not always get recognized – but the touch interface also functions better than we expected. Overall, the Eee PC T91 is a product we had a hard time justifying the purchase of — because the custom apps aren’t that useful, but they are kind of fun, and we hope future iterations will improve upon the things we really like about it. The T91 is not super cheap, either, but if you really want a tablet, it’s worth checking out – especially if, like us, you also feel the need for a keyboard.
Finally, the Asus Eee Top PCs are detailed officially by the company. The computer was apparently recently offered for pre-order in the UK, but official info appeared only now. And yes, like what we’ve been hearing for quite some time, the all-in-one PCs feature touch screen panels.
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