ASUS Eee PC T91MT Review

Review Summary

The ASUS Eee PC T91MT is enjoyable to use as a tablet that you really don’t mind the tiny keyboard and you barely touch the trackpad as you’re always touching the screen most of the time. It’s quite small and more portable than any 10-inch netbook with up to 5 hours of battery life. Despite these great points, something puts me off. The speed. It really needs a faster processor or SSD. As it is right now, speed is borderline passable, as long as you’re running things optimized with the Windows Basic theme and running on the fastest power mode.

Where to Buy the ASUS Eee PC T91MT?

Price hovers around the sub $500 mark.

Amazon.com, Newegg, Buy.com and SuperBiiz

Introduction

The original ASUS Eee PC T91 netbook had a pretty big launch in the US back in July last year (2009) after being delayed for so long. It was ASUS’ first tablet netbook and there was a lot of excitement and stock was hard to come by for a few months after it first went on sale.

Four months later, the T91MT launched and it is better in every aspect. Multi-touch display vs single-touch on the T91. Tablet friendly Windows 7 vs Windows XP. Better specs including double the storage (32GB vs 16GB SSD). Price right now is not that much different for both models, the T91 being slightly cheaper.

I’ve read alot of reviews for both models. The biggest complaint seems to be the slowness (of both the Atom Z520 processor and the SSD). I can agree with that though for certain tasks it is adequate, like web browsing. 

Contents

• External TV antenna + suction cap
• A/C cable + power brick
• Recovery CD
• Manual and warranty booklet.

Specs

• 8.9” 1024 x 600 display (resistive, multi-touch)
• Intel Atom Z520 (1.33GHz) processor
• Intel GMA 500 graphics
• 2GB RAM
• 32GB SSD + 500GB online storage
• 10/100 LAN
• 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• 0.3MP webcam
• 5 hour battery (2-cell, li-poly, non removable)
• 2x USB 2.0, 2x card readers, audio jacks, LAN, VGA, antenna out
• TV Tuner (1Seg here in Japan)
• Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit
• Colors available: black and white.
• Multi gesture trackpad
• 964 g / 2.1 pounds

Ports / Layout

Front: (card reader)

Back: (kensington lock, VGA)

Left: (power, USB 2.0, card reader (there are 2 and both can be used to expand storage)

Right: (external antenna connector, audio and mic jacks, USB 2.0 (total of 2) and LAN)

Inside: (power button located at the bottom left of the screen bezel, you can just make it out in the picture). Stylus located at the bottom right edge indicated by a symbol)

Bottom: (flat and smooth. Speakers along the left and right edges. One access panel for RAM)

Stylus

Stylus fits snugly into the front right corner. It’s just over 7cm and 11cm when fully extended. It’s solid, has nice weight to it and doesn’t feel cheap. Navigating by touch is so much easier with the stylus. Only thing I do not like is that nothing keeps the stylus fully extended. Simply standing it vertically with cause the top half to retract. On several occasions so far I have needed to stop and extend it again and again.

Display

The T91MT sports a 8.9” 1024 x 600 display, housed in a really thin screen bezel. Display brightness is adequate for indoors (I measured 133 nits), viewing angles average. The screen folds in one direction only, clockwise, into slate form and locks satisfyingly into place.

There are arrows beside the hinge telling you which direction to go. I’m pretty daft because despite that I can never remember which way to turn it and tend to try rotating the display in the other direction. I am worried that I might pull the hinge out of it’s socket one day. 

Due to the resistive touch screen on the T91MT, the screen looks grainy making it every so slightly harder to read text. While I am now accustomed to the graininess now, an’t get over the readability issue. Combine that with that fact that the screen will be slightly blurred by the dirt and oil left by your fingers, if you use fingers that is.

Due to poor vertical viewing angles on pretty much most laptops, I have found this slightly affects readability when reading text in portrait mode especially for black text on a white background. The right hand side loses a bit of contrast (bg turns grey slightly as well as text fading). It’s okay if you enlarge fonts and have margins on each side but for webpages I really do notice it.

Display can also fold back 180 degrees.

Touchscreen

The T91MT comes with a resistive multi touch display capable of recognizing two points maximum.

It took a while to get used to the softness of the screen where all previous touchscreen devices I have used have had glass coverings. It actually feels like the membrane is pulling away from the screen as it sticks to my finger. Was strange at first but feels completely normal now.

As for responsiveness of the touch screen, I read a lot of conversion about how resistive screens are less responsive but I really did not encounter that here. Well that’s not exactly true there are many times when the touch screen does not respond but that is because of the processor speed. The touch screen itself is very responsive. I will get to the processor speed issue later on.

There is no accelerometer built-in so you have to hold down a button on the bezel to rotate the display.

Keyboard

Note that I have a Japanese keyboard. Arrangement and size of keys varies slightly.

If you’ve used a 9-inch sized netbook before, you’ll know roughly how this Eee PC T91MT keyboard will work. If you’ve used a 9-inch Eee PC netbook before then you know exactly how the keyboard is, it hasn’t changed much at all on the T91MT except that the keys are much firmer and there’s pretty much no flex. This keyboard isn’t for touch typing and at best you’ll be pecking away with two fingers and this comes down to actual physical limitations rather than manufacturers being lazy and providing cramped keyboards like a lot of early 10-inch netbooks used to have. There’s just no way they could have fitted in a larger keyboard. The upside is that the screen bezel is the thinnest yet seen on a 9-inch netbook.

At most short sentences are ideal so Twittering, entering browser sites into the URL or filling in forms is about as much as you’d want to do on this keyboard and that’s okay because this is a tablet convertible netbook and ideally most of the time you’ll want to be operating in tablet mode.

One last thing worth mentioning is that there’s no keyboard shortcut for switching performance modes.

Webcam & Microphone

I used Skype to test the webcam and Audacity for the microphone. Webcam quality is okay and seems to be no different than any other 0.3MP webcam, perhaps just a tad more blurry. That goes for frame rates as well. Not smooth just slightly stuttering. Audio quality from the microphone was good though it still seemed to pick up the hum of my computer with noise cancellation on.

Audio

Decent quality stereo speakers found on the left and right bottom edges of the chassis. Satisfying though volume could go louder. At full volume settings it was just enough for a small room.

Touchpad

Since there’s a touch screen, I found myself rarely using the touchpad except for when having to navigate the Windows interface.

Touchpad is quite nice and I prefer it over the flush design on the Eee PC Seashell netbooks. Actually it seems ASUS is bringing this touchpad design on the T91MT to the next generation of Eee PCs that we’ll be seeing at CeBIT 2010. Ample sized touchpad surface and the single rocker button is neither stiff nor loud. The only thing that I didn’t like much was that my fingers couldn’t glide as easily as I wanted on the touchpad surface though I’m sure the stickiness will wear off as you use it.

Web Browsing

I really enjoy web surfing on the T91MT in slate mode and when you’re lounging around it feels much more comfortable and natural like this rather than using a netbook or laptop. Naturally you will have to install a plugin to enable touch navigation (both FireFox and Google Chrome have them).

Web browsing is just as nice in portrait mode as landscape mode but you’ll find many webpages have columns of text that won’t resize and fit the display. I find zooming out solves this issue.

There’s a short learning curve getting used to flicking and scrolling around and it seems mainly due to the slow-ish speed of the Atom Z520 processor. You’ll find that the interface (web sites) doesn’t respond as fluidly like you might see on an iPod / iPhone or the iPad. Most of the time you scroll down and wait a second for the screen to catch up. It’s actually not as bad as it sounds. Turning off Windows Aero really helps speed things up (as I mention again elsewhere)

You can flick left and right to go back / forward in the browser, as provided by Windows 7 touch settings, though for some strange reason it always seems to go back / foward 2 steps per flick.

Note taking

I have never done note taking before on a tablet and can’t envision any situation where I’ll ever have to do it so my thoughts on this feature are from a newbie’s point of view.

I am surprised at how well handwritten input is recognized and with a little bit of practice I was writing sentences within minutes. Correction of text is quite intuitive and easy to discover.

I have two issues though. First it takes a while before one of your handwritten words is parsed and converted to text. By the time this happens you’ll be several words ahead. In other words it’s lagging behind your hand writing.

The last issue I have is that there is no built-in palm rejection. You can’t rest your palm on the screen and write away. Writing has to be done with your wrist in the air. Try that now on a piece of paper and see how uncomfortable that is. I can’t stand writing like this on the tablet. ASUS provides an option somewhere (I found it once but cannot find it again) to choose pen or finger mode. Apparently pen mode supports some kind of palm rejection but it is limited to Sticky Notes and Journal. (source)

Apparently there are only two apps that support palm rejection (software implementation by ASUS). Sticky notes and journal. No global palm rejection.

Ebook Reading

I tested out Adobe’s Ebook Reader and went through a couple of free sample books and flicked through some PDFs in Adobe Reader. I didn’t have enough time to really go into this and out of the box neither seemed to work well with touch out of the box. Aside from the lack of software knowledge on my part, text seems okay, readable but the grit on the display plus the loss of contrast on the right (due to viewing angle) is slightly noticeable and may affect readability. I don’t read books on my computers (the Kindle thing and all) so this is really new to me and I can’t do this section justice.

Performance

Performance seems to feel slightly slower than your average Atom N powered netbook (though the below benchmark says otherwise). As usual with Eee PCs, ASUS provides SHE, a power management app that allows you to scale processor performance. The difference between the lowest and fastest mode is that on battery mode, the Windows GUI can barely keep up and stutters while you don’t notice this at all on performance mode. It’s actually a good idea to turn off Windows Aero effects and stick to the Windows Basic theme for improved speed, and you’ll need to do that if you intend on watching 1080p video.

For web browsing, speed is satisfactory but a faster processor would have meant for fluid, real time navigation by touch (without lag).

It’s not just the processor affecting speed, but the SSD installed has really slow write speeds and below average read speeds. Putting in a faster SSD will result in a much snappier system (you’ll have to completely dismantle the netbook though). Here’s a comparison with my Samsung’s 250GB HDD (left) and the 32GB SSD on the T91MT (right):

Here’s a look at relative performance using the CrystalMark 2004R3 benchmarking tool:

Note that this takes graphics into account as well which is why the Acer Aspire Revo ends up with a higher score than all netbooks even though with everyday tasks it’ll perform similarly. I am kind of suprised to see the T91MT score the same as the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE in performance mode.

HD Video

Thanks to the GMA 500 graphics on board, 1080p HD video on the T91MT’s screen is possible. I tested out various formats. 1080p H.264 video was not completely smooth , 720p H.264 was smooth and so was 1080p MP4 video. All videos were running on Super Performance mode. Forget about connecting up to a larger monitor to watch HD videos at HD resolution. Playback was jerky at best at 1920 x 1200 resolution.

720p YouTube HD was slightly stuttering but audio was synced. Not a slide show like before Flash 10.1 and the latest GMA 500 Windows 7 drivers were installed but I would say it’s not really watchable. Flash 10.1 drivers are still Beta so we could see some improvement later on.

TV Tuner

In particular countries, the T91MT is sold with a built-in TV tuner as well as an attachable external, extendible antenna with a suction cap so you can stick on the wall or someplace higher. Here in Japan it is using 1Seg. On my cellphone I can pick up TV channels quite easily anywhere in my apartment but I cannot pick up anything on the T91MT. Even with the antenna attached at best I can pick up channels but not view them. Signal is too weak. I’ve had fleeting seconds of success where I got reception but the image quality was very poor.

I had a Kohjinsha tablet convertible previously with the same setup and it had no problems picking up channels inside my apartment (as well as my phone) so something seems amiss with the T91MT and it’s ability to pick up a reception)

I have not tried picking up a reception outdoors yet.

Battery Life

I’m getting around 4.5 hours with light web surfing with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on, at the lowest brightness notches (notches 1-4). That’s on super performance mode. I bet you could reach 5 hours on battery saving mode though I find the speed on super performance mode much more enjoyable so I’ve been using this mode most of the time.

Battery Life	Test	Settings
4:27	Light web browsing (no Flash)	Super Performance, Wi-Fi / BT ON,  1-4th brightness notches, audio ON
4:15	480p (DivX) video playback	Battery Saving, Wi-Fi / BT OFF, 53% brightness, audio ON
4:11	720p (H.264) video playback	Battery Saving, Wi-Fi / BT OFF, 53% brightness, audio ON

Here’s a relative comparison of battery life on various laptops / netbooks that I have reviewed previously. These tests were done using my 480p video playback test.

Upgrades

Not much to upgrade. There’s a single RAM slot, however 2GB of RAM is already installed and the maximum possible is 2GB. There’s an on / off switch and reset button next to the RAM slot just in case you can’t power down your T91MT (battery is not removable).

If you want to access the Wi-Fi card or SSD, you’ll have to take completely apart the whole machine to access those parts and there is a warranty void sticker underneath the keyboard. See JKKMobile’s video on upgrading the SSD drive.

You can increase storage with the two provided card slots. Both show up as removable storage devices in Windows Explorer.

Heat

Bottom gets pretty warm, since the T91MT is fanless. I left the machine on a hard wooden surface top, for an hour running HD YouTube and measured the following temperatures below. Top gets slightly warm and bottom gets extremely warm.

Noise

Since the T91MT is fanless it is completely silent. Nothing more to be said.

Linux

There’s a complete lack of support for touch screens in Linux, at least out of the box but I gave Jolicloud a go just to see if the hardware is supported. Install went fine. Brightness works. Wi-Fi works. Volume works but not the associated hotkeys. Could not resume from standby (screen stays blank).

Size & Weight

Much more portable than any 10-inch netbook but that is stating the obvious, however as relatively light as it is at 964 grams / 2.1 pounds (compared to 10-inchers or larger) it is still a little too heavy to be holding in one hand. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable a 10-inch would be to hold (haven’t tested one yet)

I always have to rest the tablet against something if I am not using both hands. I did a quick test and timed how long I could hold the tablet in portrait mode and holding the left edge. By the 2:00 mark I was feeling very uncomfortable and was starting to feel pain at the 2:46 mark.

Due to the li-poly battery the T91MT manages to stay slightly more thin than most 10-inch netbooks even though tablet convertibles tend to quite thick. Comparing the screen portion to that of my Samsung N140 it is definitely thicker.

Several shots comparing my T91MT to a Samsung N140:

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