Eee T91MT - Anyone getting a multitouch netbook?

Mine is on the way. I've been using a Smart Q7(7" chinese arm device) as an ebook reader but decided to grab one of these and maybe spend a bit less time with my 17" laptop as well as use it for an ebook reader.

I'm fairly excited as the combination of a larger/faster ssd plus windows 7 seems to have solved most of the complaints from the T91 owners, plus multitouch. Hopefully it will arrive by Friday.

I'm not sure if I can justify spending $550 on a 9" netbook/laptop.

Should say netbook/tablet. My needs called for a very small tablet device and for $532 at Amazon it's one of the lest expensive options. It's the only option with multitouch. I was really, really looking at the Archos 9 but I don't like it's lack of an ssd, lack or multitouch and crappy win7 starter edition.

Please do a review for us with pictures! I'm very interested on the multitouch portion of the netbook. Hopefully win 7's touch features will work well and will be worth that 532$.

If you're using it as an ereader, why not get a kindle 2? It's half the price and vastly, vastly easier on the eyes with regards to eyestrain. IF that's all you're using it for anyway.

Color vs no color, backlight vs none, single purpose device vs full pc, etc

Here's what I'm interested in:

1) What other purchases (if any) did you make? (RAM, HDD, etc.)
2) How does Win 7 run on it
3) How is heavy flash use

I was on the edge about the T91. The main Issue I have is the 1.33 ghz Atom. I have a friend with a eee pc 1.6 ghz atom that experiences noticeable lag during flash HD video playback. If I were to buy the T91 though, I would personally upgrade the RAM and HDD (can win7 even fit on the 16 gb that it comes with?). In which case of course it'd cost more.

The alternate option is the 12" HP Tablet for ~$820 with no need to upgrade and will of course run much faster.

GhostDog said:

Color vs no color, backlight vs none, single purpose device vs full pc, etc

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The single purpose device is the deal-breaker there. But you said you were mostly using your current one for e-reading. And for that, There isn't a computer on the planet that's better than the kindle, or any of the new e-ink readers. Color e-ink is in the pipeline, but not readily available yet. And the backlight is the very thing that CAUSES eyestrain.

Anyway, the point is moot if you do want a full pc.

Me! *raises hand* I want one.

I've been interested in the T91 ever since I heard about it. I was really intrigued with the idea of a tablet PC, and at first I was thinking of getting one of those 12" multitouch HP tx2 tablets for $1000. But I really like the small form factor and low weight of netbooks, so as soon as I heard about T91 - a netbook/tablet, I was all over it.

The only thing holding me back was the lack of multitouch, and knowing that the MT version is coming soon with Windows 7.

So now I'm just waiting for the T91MT to be made (more) available in Canada.

I'm not sure if I can justify spending $550 on a 9" netbook/*tablet*.

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That's true, for a 8.9" netbook it seems quite expensive. I got my current Aspire One 8.9" for only $200. You have to really consider if the tablet functionality is worth double the price to you. As it stands now, it's the only option of getting a tablet (other than hacking together a touch screen into a regular netbook).

I mostly want it for using while lying in bed and such, surfing the internet using touch, as well as being able to do some note taking and drawings, etc.

I bought my current device for the same reasons. It's capable of running ubuntu, maemo mer, android and windows ce - plus it's a full color backlit touchscreen.

I do almost all my reading at night in bed which from what I had read, before I decided on anything, is pretty much e-ink's weakest area and I doubt that any backlight caused eyestrain(which I have not experienced even tho I usually read for several hours at a time) is likely going to be less than the strain caused by trying to read an e-ink device in a poorly lit room. Also iirc at the time I bought it the Kindle 2 was something dumb like $350 and the arm device was just over $200. Any short amount of reading that I'd regularly do away from home during breaks or lunch, etc is going to be done on my iphone anyway. So, while I agree that the Kindle is a great device, I don't think that my reading habits or needs put me into the group of people at whom the device is targeted.

My wife reads alot, and at the same time that I do, so moving her over to ebooks makes sense and I do nearly all my personal computing on the couch. At the time I got my current laptop I was pretty much a pc gamer, so a 17" Gateway laptop seemed like the right choice in moving away from desktop computing and it was, at the time. However, since then, I've found that I now vastly prefer console gaming(when my family will let me have some time on the tv that is) so I'm looking to move to a device that's more portable than a 17" desktop replacement and just pull that out when I need to do things like edit photos and the like.

Erm, anyway.. those are most of the reasons that I won't be getting a Kindle, m'kay?

Intel_Hydralisk said:

Here's what I'm interested in:

1) What other purchases (if any) did you make? (RAM, HDD, etc.)
2) How does Win 7 run on it
3) How is heavy flash use

I was on the edge about the T91. The main Issue I have is the 1.33 ghz Atom. I have a friend with a eee pc 1.6 ghz atom that experiences noticeable lag during flash HD video playback. If I were to buy the T91 though, I would personally upgrade the RAM and HDD (can win7 even fit on the 16 gb that it comes with?). In which case of course it'd cost more.

The alternate option is the 12" HP Tablet for ~$820 with no need to upgrade and will of course run much faster.

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To answer the above question about video on a T91, I just came across this today and 1080p at nearly 90fps seems like pretty decent performance. The T91MT has a 32gb ssd as well as two sdhc slots so storage wont be an issue, for me at least. Twelve inches is a bit too big for my purposes, heck the 9" device is going to be pushing it a bit.

edit: That's what I get for reading too fast. I did not purchase ram, but I probably will before too long. The only accessory I've purchased so far is a five pack of 3M matte screen protectors.

There are some reviews popping up on Amazon.com, and one of them basically confirms my biggest fears. The touchscreen is just not very responsive, and doesn't even come close to iPhone in terms of usability.

Review Link

I sorta already knew and expected that, but reading it from another user makes me really doubt if I wanna get this device.

Maybe just an iPhone will do, even though it has a small screen. =/

GhostDog said:

I was really, really looking at the Archos 9 but I don't like it's lack of an ssd, lack or multitouch and crappy win7 starter edition.

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Netbook class systems with win7 other than starter are few and far between. Short of Joe Moron getting fed up and insisting on paying more for Home Premium at bustbuy I don't expect this to change.

HP Mini 311 comes with premium.

DanNeely said:

Netbook class systems with win7 other than starter are few and far between. Short of Joe Moron getting fed up and insisting on paying more for Home Premium at bustbuy I don't expect this to change.

Click to expand...

Tablet devices that don't come with a version of windows that supports tablet features are dumb. Doesn't matter if it's the norm or not.



It hasn't come yet, I'm sad.

Here are some good news about the T91MT.

Apparently there is an option to enable some sort of Palm Rejection, which apparently works quite well. The only downside? It only works for 2 apps for now.

http://myt91.info/?p=178

It arrived yesterday. I want to spend a few days tweaking, etc before I write a full review of my experiences with it. But, here's a mini-review:

It wasn't love at first sight but, if you want to skip the rest, it's getting there.

I'll just list the things that I don't like at the beginning. First, the Touch Suite/Screen Orientation button. Asus, seriously? Windows has a built in feature called Tablet Buttons. Why doesn't your button work with this? If it did, I could CHOOSE how the button works. What I would choose is to have it switch between normal landscape and secondary portrait. But trying to use the control panel option "Set tablet buttons to perform certain tasks" reveals that you've chosen not to have your button work with this feature. To add insult to injury, you also chose not to allow any customization in your button app. Since I removed most of the preinstalled crap that I don't need, or want, pressing the button once does nothing. Holding the button down for three seconds begins the rotation process but I have to keep holding the button and cycle through all four possible orientations. Why? I'm only interested in two of them.

Second, Windows should have been tweaked to be more finger friendly. It's really simple. Windows Explorer should default to the Large Icons view. Also, custom DPI should be set at a minimum to 125%. This makes the desktop and taskbar icons about the right size. It can be set under Control Panel -> Display and can be increased further by selecting "Set custom text size (DPI)" on the same menu. Setting it to 150% is nice, but some of the icons get a bit ugly this big.

Ok, the last thing I don't like. I was shocked at how heavy it is. The weight is probably in line with other netbooks but I had never handled one before. The weight is probably more than twice that of the 7" MID I was using before.

That's it, everything else is great - or will be when I finish tweaking it. Since this is a full version of Windows, not WinCE, etc like the MID has, I'll be able to tweak pretty much everything. For instance, my first complaint. While I cannot make the button behave like I want it to(yet), what I can do is use an application called iRotate to create a batch file like so

"C:\Program Files\iRotate\iRotate.exe" /rotate=270
start /wait "" "C:\Program Files\ComicRack\ComicRack.exe"
"C:\Program Files\iRotate\iRotate.exe" /rotate=0

Now I create a shortcut to comicrack.bat on the start menu, change the icon to comicrack.exe's icon and I'm all set. What happens here is that cmd opens, rotates the screen to portrait, opens comicrack, waits for comicrack to close and then rotates the screen back to landscape. It's actually a better solution, for me, than the button. Since I only want portrait for a few programs, I can just use this take care of the rotation process automatically.

ComicRack, btw, is beautiful. The entire screen is great. It only requires light touches and the viewing angles are good. There's no reversing of colors, or shifting of hues, at different angles. It's really very nice.

System speed is ok. The very first thing I did was uninstall all the crap. I could feel it speeding up as I removed the preinstalled utilities. Let me say it again, the system speed is ok. It is not, however, great. The included SSD is fast enough that Windows won't let me use an SD card for ReadyBoost because it wouldn't help.

The hardware is solidly built, especially the hinge mechanism for the screen. I'm extremely satisfied with the build quality. I'll have to get used to the keyboard, but that will come. I don't see myself trying to type a long document on it anyway.

So it's fast enough, well built, quality parts and only a few minor annoyances. Everything else is going to be tweaking. As an example, web browsing really needs to be done in Full Screen. No problem except that both IE and Firefox require you to move the mouse to the very top of the screen in order to see the address bar and tabs. This means either pulling out the stylus or using your fingernail to try and click the very top edge of the screen - that sucked. In Firefox all you have to do is type about:config in the address bar, enter, then find browser.fullscreen.autohide and set it to false. Problem solved and now full screen browsing is great.

Really the only other thing I can think of, right now, is that most pc applications weren't designed with a touchscreen in mind. So, I'm having alittle trouble finding an ebook reader that I like but FBreader is working out ok for now.

Oh, Kindle for PC.. er, why does your window have a minimum width? Know what that means? It won't work in portrait on a netbook. Stanza? Why does it take you forever to load a 1.5mb book?

Ok, I'm done for now and I guess this wasn't a mini-review. I'll add some pics later.

Thanks for the first impressions, GhostDog.

I'm curious, you said you were shocked how heavy the device was. It's actually *the* lightest netbook at around 950 grams. Was your previous 7" MID really around 500 grams only? What is it called?

Also, I'm curious if Chrome can be used in tablet mode... Such that you can scroll pages by dragging 2 fingers on the screen. Something like that Firefox plugin drag-to-scroll or whatever (I'm guessing).

My MID is a SmartQ 7 and weighs 480 grams so pretty much half. I figured the weight wasn't out of line but it was still more than I thought it would be. Honestly, as an ebook reader I'll go ahead right now and say the MID is a superior device. That said, I'm posting on the T91MT and I wouldn't bother doing that on the MID.

Chrome should work fine since flicks are natively supported in Win7. I didn't even need the Firefox plugin but I went ahead and installed it for accelerated scrolling.

I've been surfing on it now for the last few hours and I'm really enjoying it.

Wow, that's awesome about Chrome and Windows 7. How good/reliable/efficient is this 2-finger scrolling? Can it compare in ease of use to that of iPhone, or is it much more awkward or something?

Yea, I see your point about a 480 gram device vs. this. But I'm still surprised its so lightweight, given that it has a 4-5 hour battery.

Or we could just all wait for the Crunchpad

bunta said:

Or we could just all wait for the Crunchpad

Click to expand...

Or the Apple tablet that might never come out.

shurcooL said:

Wow, that's awesome about Chrome and Windows 7. How good/reliable/efficient is this 2-finger scrolling? Can it compare in ease of use to that of iPhone, or is it much more awkward or something?

Yea, I see your point about a 480 gram device vs. this. But I'm still surprised its so lightweight, given that it has a 4-5 hour battery.

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I had to look up 2 finger scrolling and now that I know what it is, it's not necessary. You can scroll in the browser by placing one finger in the browser window and moving it where you want to go. Actually, I just tried it and the touchpad supports 2 finger scrolling without the need for a plugin. It's slightly different, you rest one finger on the pad and slide the other. Doing the same action on the screen is, of course, zoom in or out.

GhostDog said:

I had to look up 2 finger scrolling and now that I know what it is, it's not necessary. You can scroll in the browser by placing one finger in the browser window and moving it where you want to go. Actually, I just tried it and the touchpad supports 2 finger scrolling without the need for a plugin. It's slightly different, you rest one finger on the pad and slide the other. Doing the same action on the screen is, of course, zoom in or out.

Click to expand...

Sorry, I was just referring to the normal scrolling in tablet mode. I didn't know it's done using just one finger. How would it differentiate between you wanting to drag something vs. scroll the page?

In any case, what I really wanted to know was how good is scrolling using your finger(s) when in tablet mode... Is it well done (like it is in the iPhone imo), or does it feel laggy/clumsy/non-responsive/etc.?

The default setting doesn't scroll fast enough but once you turn down the inertia resistance it's good. As far as how it determines, if you begin the drag vertically then it's a scroll and if you begin horizontally then it's either select or drag. It's very natural and I had to stop just now to figure out what it was doing so I could explain it.

edit:also, I meant to mention that turning the brightness all the way down and wifi/bluetooth off results in windows claiming like 6 1/2 hours battery life.

Thanks. One more thing for you to try out if you're willing. See if the SSD is slow enough for FlashFire to be significantly beneficial.

There is some risk involved, so it's a good idea to make a full backup so that you can restore if needed. However, it works fine for most people, and I've been using it without any problems both in XP and 7 on my Acer Aspire One A110. It significantly speeds up my system, since this SSD's write speeds are awful (and that's where FlashFire shines).

You're likely to notice a huge speedup in Windows itself if it works well, otherwise it means the SSD is already pretty fast at writes.

It's be nice if you could actually benchmark the SSD before and after FlashFire using ATTO Disk Benchmark (using default settings).

It would look something like this:



Just throwing this out there in case you run out of ideas of what to try next. Thanks again.

Haven't run any benchmarks but, to update you, I've had to start an exchange with Amazon because there is a strip that runs the entire height of the screen - about an inch wide and two inches from the left in normal landscape, where touches are registered a half inch too high. It took me awhile to figure out that it was happening but it's consistent and annoying.

Amazon rocks tho, they offer advanced exchange on the site by default. I didn't have to call to request it, that was very nice.

edit: here's the problem, and I'll go straight to paint on the replacement to make sure it doesn't do it too

drawn with the stylus and an envelope for a quick straight edge

Sorry for not doing it sooner. Since I took so long I thought I'd be thorough. So, here are benches without flashfire and with while running normal apps (firefox with 6 tabs, trillian, etc) then with everything closed.

without flashfire / with apps


without flashfire / without apps


with flashfire / with apps


with flashfire / without apps

Awesome, thanks a lot man!

Did you notice any improvement in performance after installing FlashFire? How about Windows 7 boot-up time?

It looks like T91MT's SSD is already pretty fast at writes to begin with, so FlashFire is not making as much a dramatic difference as it does on SSDs with terrible write speeds. But I still see an improvement of around 20-40% in write speeds, so I'd expect maybe a 5-15% faster boot-up time and boost in general responsiveness (unless the netbook's CPU is already a bottleneck, rather than the SSD).

Any comments?

Just for reference, the effect of FlashFire on my AOA110 with a very-slow-at-writes SSD is extremely huge. General responsiveness goes way up, and W7 boot-time (time from power button until I see Google homepage) is reduced from 1 min 40 seconds to 45 seconds.

I haven't noticed a huge difference, but the increased write speeds on the benchmark are enough that I'm going to leave it installed. Load/boot speeds seem about the same, which is good since the benches lead me to believe that it actually slowed the reads slightly.

I suspect that more ram would help even more so I'll be rerunning those when I get around to installing a 2gb stick but that'll be a few weeks off.

Well, I'm sorry to say that the replacement arrived today and the screen has basically the same problem. It's not as pronounced but it sucks nonetheless. Asus took great hardware and couipled it with a very crappy touchscreen. Just sending them both back to Amazon for a refund and getting a dedicated reader instead.

That doesn't look so bad (compared to the last), is it?

It's not as bad, but imagine the frustration of trying to click the page number on the forum here with your finger. Now imagine that frustration multiplied because the screen is up to 1/4" off in random places. It may be that the device isn't really meant to be used with fingers. However that does not really jive with the multitouch functionality (at least I cannot imagine how I'd comfortably hold the unit, a stylus and navigate with another finger).

What these lines also don't show is that it is impossible to correctly calibrate two points on the bottom right hand corner of the screen. The first one was actually much, much more accurate on the non-problem areas of the screen.

Yeah, that kinda sucks (if you were really doing perfectly straight lines, yet getting those not-so-straight results, meaning it's way off sometimes).

People hate on Apple all the time, but this just goes to show. It is really *really* hard to create a multitouch device that's as good as the iPhone/iPod Touch, even in 2009. =(

I used a small stiff catalog that came in the mail today as a straight edge. I held one side on the bezel and my wife held the other side on the opposite bezel - to keep the junk mail from contacting the screen. That left room for a small amount of wobble so the lines aren't perfectly straight. The spots where the lines curve and spike noticeably upwards are spots where the cursor clearly moved away from where the stylus tip touched the screen.

Several of the "previews" based on the press release complained about the lack of an active digitizer. I'm guessing this is why.

It's really a shame. The first unit was very accurate, except for the one vertical strip, and handwriting recognition worked great. The secoond got about ten tests in paint plus several (re)calibrations and then went right back in the box. If I were to keep one it would be the first because it's easy to predict where I'd have to compensate for the touchscreen and it could, at least, complete a calibration properly.

shurcooL said:

Yeah, that kinda sucks (if you were really doing perfectly straight lines, yet getting those not-so-straight results, meaning it's way off sometimes).

People hate on Apple all the time, but this just goes to show. It is really *really* hard to create a multitouch device that's as good as the iPhone/iPod Touch, even in 2009. =(

Click to expand...

Not really. The Zune has great multi-touch response. My tx2 has multi-touch and a electromagnetic pen and its working great under Windows 7, its really can be useful. The Asus issue is just bad hardware or crappy hardware. The real way to do this is with a capacitive and electromagnetic screen like the tx2, Dell XT1, etc. But that's more expensive but I heard that Wacom is going to boost production of their panels like 500%, so maybe we'll start to see some price drops and better tech into these smaller device.

I've also just gotten a T91MT and mine seem to have an even worse touch screen than yours

Here's my paint-test:


Vertical lines, however don't have this problem.

Yeah, that seems pretty bad.

Did you make those lines with a perfectly straight horizontal motion, or just sweep your finger/stylus across?

In either case, it should be possible to calibrate the screen with software to take into account those misreadings, at least in theory. I don't think it's possible in practice (no such software).

I did it quickly by hand, so that the lines aren't straight are to be expected. But the 3 areas where all the lines suddenly move a bit up or down are not. I agree that it should be possible in theory to calibrate it, but I don't think I'm gonna wait for that software.

Wow, I feel like the two I returned weren't that bad in comparison.

OK, here's a weird thing: I just found that there is an Asus Calibration tool in addition to Windows 7's own calibration (which I've run many times with the same result). After running the Asus tool the touchscreen now actually works perfectly! Been surfing the web in tablet mode ever since