Asus Eee PC T91

We first caught sight of the Asus Eee PC T91 at CES 2009 back in January, and were immediately taken with the idea of combining a small, low-cost netbook with a touchscreen interface. Seven months later, the final product is here, and it's largely successful for a first attempt at this kind of hybrid. It's a much more flexible way to interact with a netbook — especially if you're tripped up by the tiny touch pads and keyboards found on most mini laptops.

The Eee PC T91 has a rotating display that can be spun 180 degrees and folded down, akin to what you'd see in something like the HP TouchSmart tx2, and its screen reacts to your finger or an included non-active stylus. The optional custom touch interface, with big, easy to grab icons, works well — even if it's not as slick and responsive as the touch interface on, for example, an iPhone.

We appreciate Asus' attempt to keep the price firmly in traditional netbook territory, and a convertible tablet laptop for only AU$999 seems like a good deal, even for one with a smallish 9-inch screen. Our US counterparts pick it up for US$499 though, making quite the significant mark-up. Other than this, our main hang-ups are the use of a slower version of Intel's Atom CPU and the small 16GD SSD hard drive (plus an additional included 16GB SD card, with a 30GB external drive for 62GB total).

The T91 looks and feels small and light, even for a netbook. That's because it's built around a 9-inch screen, rather then the bigger 10-inch (and now 11.6-inch) displays found in most current netbooks. The obvious compromises, besides the smaller display, are the tiny keyboard and touch pad, but the trade-off is a system that's very svelte and easy to carry. It's smaller even than the original 7-inch Eee PC.

Of course, a touchscreen laptop is not meant to be primarily used with a traditional keyboard and touch pad. The screen on the Eee PC T91 is a resistive touch panel, so it works with any input device, such as your fingers or the included non-active stylus. And because using a small touchscreen, whether on a 9-inch netbook or an even smaller UMPC can be a hassle when trying to fumble around Windows XP, Asus has included a custom interface meant for finger-driven computing.

You launch the Touch Gate interface by either tapping a physical button on the screen bezel (you hold the same button down to rotate through screen orientations), launching from a desktop shortcut, or by tapping a launch button on the Mac-like Eee dock bar that sits at the top of the Windows XP desktop.

There's a short animation of the screen rotating, landing on the main Touch Gate interface window. This screen holds five large app icons, meant for easy tapping with a finger or stylus. A small button at the bottom of the screen brings up a longer list of apps, and you can drag choices onto or off of the large five-app menu bar, setting up your own custom collection of frequently used apps.

Besides the custom version of Internet Explorer that includes some useful finger gesture controls (although we'd much rather see a version of Firefox), Asus also includes a handful of proprietary software packages, including notepad and memo programs for handwriting notes. Most interesting was FotoFun, which lets you flip through photo galleries, moving and rotating photos with your finger (similar to what we've seen in HP's TouchSmart systems).

By flicking your finger (or the stylus) near the right side of the main Touch Gate screen, the display flips to the third interface, a full-screen widget dock built around the Yahoo Widget engine. You can drag different widgets — from clocks to calendars to battery life indicators — anywhere on the screen. Asus includes several useful widgets to start with, and more are available from Yahoo.

Flicking your finger near the right side of the Widget screen will take you back to the main Windows XP desktop. From there, you'll have to launch the Touch Gate interface via one of the shortcut buttons to get back to it.

While any kind of custom interface has its own quirks and requires a learning curve, the results here are largely successful, and Touch Gate gives you access to lots of useful functions. Most of the large icons worked well with our fingers, and our main hang-ups were that we repeatedly accidentally flipped between the three main interface screens by touching too close to the screen edges, and some of the small on-screen tools (particularly the Close and Settings buttons on the Yahoo widgets) really require the stylus or touch pad pointer to use.

The 8.9-inch widescreen LED display offers a 1024x600 native resolution, which is standard for netbooks. These days, we're also used to larger 10-inch displays, and the smaller screen may take a little getting used to. However, we said largely the same thing about 7-inch displays when the first 9-inch netbooks hit the market.

With 802.11n and Bluetooth, the T91 is a well-equipped netbook. The 16GB SSD hard drive feels like a bit of a throwback — and Asus must have sensed the same thing, because a second SD card slot is built in, and there's an extra 16GB SD card included in the box as well as a 30GB external drive. By plugging the SD card into the second SD card slot (labelled "disk-expander"), you now have a much more practical 32GB of total storage. Asus also gives customers 20GB of online drive space, using a built-in app called Eee Storage, but that's only free for the first 18 months.

Our main knock against the Eee PC T91 is the inclusion of the 1.33GHz version of Intel's Atom processor, instead of the more common 1.6GHz N270 version (or even the faster 1.66GHz N280 that Asus is particularly fond of). The 11.6-inch Acer Aspire One 751h made the same mistake, and in our benchmark tests, both the T91 and the Acer Aspire One 751h fell behind other netbooks.

While the performance difference was not enough to be a deal breaker, netbooks are generally pokey products to begin with, and even a tiny bit of additional slowdown can be frustrating. We'd trade a little battery life for a powerful processor and a zippier overall experience (although even with the slower CPU, the custom touch apps ran smoothly most of the time).

The Eee PC T91 ran for four hours and 20 minutes on our video playback battery drain test. That's impressive (even if Asus' 10-inch 1005HA netbook ran for more than an extra two hours on the same test), considering the small chassis requires a small battery, and the additional drain of powering a touchscreen display.

Asus Eee PC T91
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 256MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 500; 16GB ASUS-JM S41 SSD + 16GB SD Expansion Card

Acer Aspire One AO751h-1545
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 256MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 500; 160GB Seagate 5400rpm

HP Mini 110
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 128MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Seagate 5400rpm

Toshiba Mini NB205
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz; 128MB (Shared) Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Toshiba 5400rpm

Asus Eee PC 1005HA
Windows XP Home Edition SP3; 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280; 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz; 224MB Mobile Intel GMA 950; 160GB Hitachi 5400rpm

Specifications

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