The EEE PC T91 is the first tablet netbook by ASUS with full touchscreen feature and has launched in the US retail market. Generally, touchscreen tablets are an oft-repeated blend of excitement and disappointment in many ways. Some of them are great ideas combined with mediocre hardware, and some are mix of nice-looking hardware with bad execution of the touchscreen. Let’s see if the T91 would be able to sidestep these issues.

The T91 is a compact little machine and has a pretty attractive physical appearance. It weights only two pounds including the lithium polymer battery with a thickness of only an inch. The LCD can swivel to the left and move quite smoothly, giving a sturdy feeling about the netbook. The 8.9-inch EEC PC T91 provides a small and standard keyboard that allows surprisingly easy and efficient typing. The machine is certainly compact but not cramped and features a nice clickness. The backlit LED resistive touch panel of this machine is considerably bright and good looking, though, at the same time, its very glossy and takes fingerprint easily. It boasts two USB, one VGA, and two audio ports, and a power button on the screen’s left bottom edge. There is another button directly to the right of the power button, which is one of the means of activating the touch interface. Moreover, it has a flexible stylus fitted under the bottom right side of the main body.When it comes about the specs of T91, it has an Intel Atom Z520 1.33 GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 16GB SSD, Intel GMA500 graphics and a lithium polymer battery that offers 5 hours of constant backup. Other than that, it also features 802.11 B/G/N Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 plus EDR and 10/100Mbps Ethernet.

To get the touchscreen appropriately responsive, the T91 comprises an easy, 9-point calibration procedure and also loaded with some custom-built software called Touch Gate interface. The touchscreen interface can be activated from the usual XP desktop in three different ways- via the desktop icon, the slider icon on the top of the desktop and a physical button located right to the power toggle. Hitting any of those will bring up the main Touch Gate interface which is basically a very simple row or different icons that can be reorganized in any order. Memos and Notepad is pretty self explanatory without plenty of whistles and bells, but the applications work very much efficiently. The touchscreen is quite responsive and calibrated to both fingertip and stylus, so the notes can be made with actual handwriting after getting a little used to with the process.

Flicking your finger left to the Touch Gate interface, a new screen named ‘Widget Screen’ will appear which comes with various pre-installed and customizable Yahoo Widgets. Overall, the software with the T91 is designed really nicely and operates pretty good as advertised. However, there are few limitations with the CPU and the responsive touchscreen, we had to move slower than we usually want to.

Available for : $489.99

Also available in this store:
- Amazon ($499.99)