Asus Eee PC T91 Tablet Review

The Eee PC T91 is Asus’ first tablet netbook and while it’s not really the first one in this category (Gigabyte did the M912 tablet netbook last year), Asus is looking to revive the trend of the tablet PC.

At 8.9 inch, the Asus T91 is an appropriately sized tablet — pretty light but not too small. It has a glossy, black finish that makes it look elegant and classy (in the same league as the Asus Seashell series).Think of this as a smaller, thinner and lighter 1000HE with a swivel hinge instead of stilts.

The keyboard is tightly packed and though the keys a bit small, they’re the chiclet-type so touch-typing isn’t too hard to do. The trackpad has been improved as well although there’s no separation between the left and right click buttons.

Powering the Eee PC T91 is the cooler Atom Z520 running at 1.33GHz (same CPU as the Sony Vaio P VGN-P13GH and the Acer Aspire One AO751) with a 1GB DDR2 RAM (upgradeable to 2GB) so don’t expect it to be speedy when launching programs. Good thing it’s pre-installed with Windows XP rather than Vista. With the 1.33GHz Z520, CPU performance is evident when running them between XP, Vista and Windows 7 (see my reviews on the other ultraportables with the same CPU).

The 8.9″ touchscreen has a resolution of 1024×768 pixels and not the usual 1024×600 in its class. Asus should also make its other 10-inch netbooks in the same resolution. The tablet also comes with a stylus tucked at the front side corner.

The LED screen is supported by a single hinge at the center that swivels a full 180-degrees and flips down to transform into the tablet form. The touch sensitivity is good enough but not that pretty accurate (you’ll need to do some calibrations first).

The T91 also comes with a separate Touch UI which you can launch from XP or via a dedicated slider button at the bottom left side of the screen. It’s a collection of softwares (TouchSuite) that’s made for specific touch functions like notepad, memo, photos and browsing.

The storage is a 16GB SSD and not the typical big-sized hard drives (the 80GB to 160GB) and while that might have contributed to the lightness of the netbook, I still think the 16GB is big enough.

There’s Bluetooth 2.1 and WiFi 802.11n but did not see the optional GPS, TV Tuner of 3G modem Asus say you can equip it with. As for the battery life, I think I’m getting around 4 something hours although Asus claims it tops at 5 hours, which is not bad.

No word on the final retail price yet but my guess is that this one could fetch a price tag of around Php25USD 0.43INR 36EUR 0.41CNY 3 to Php30k.