It's inevitable that the netbook would evolve to include touchscreen-equipped units and we're not surprised to find that the original pioneer, Asus, is the first company to take the netbook form factor to its next evolutionary step. The Asus Eee PC Touch T91 is a netbook with a twist.

Outwardly, the T91 looks like any one of the current crop of netbooks. The glossy black exterior of our test unit looked great and the dark blue specks give the T91 a distinctive look. Unlike most of the high-end netbooks, the T91 has a 9-inch screen running at 1024 by 600. The display is also touch sensitive and therein lies the T91's greatest point of market differentiation.

When the display is perpendicular to the keyboard, it can be rotated 180 degrees and then folded down converting the T91 into a slate-style computer that makes it ideal for reading documents and scribbling notes on the go. The screen can be easily toggled between portrait and landscape modes by holding down a button on the bezel and there's a stylus that can be pulled from a slot on the T91's body for tapping on icons and writing on the screen.

We opened several PDFs and other documents to put the T91 through its paces as a tablet system. While the screen was very clear and great for reading documents, we found touchscreen performance to be less than satisfactory. Scribbling notes using the included note-taking software, we found that it wrote well some of the time but occasionally couldn't keep up with us resulting in some screen touches not being recognised. To confirm this we played a few hands of Solitaire and found that cards we difficult to drag and drop.

Unlike the majority of netbooks that use either the Intel Atom N270 or N280 processor, Asus has chosen to take the road less travelled and chosen the Atom Z520 processor. This CPU uses less power than the N280 - it's rated at about 25% fewer watts, but delivers a slower clock speed of 1.33GHz and has a 533MHz front-side bus rather than the N280's 667MHz.

Video playback is the biggest, real world challenge we can throw at a netbook. This activity puts the T91's RAM, disk and CPU to the test. Unsurprisingly, the T91 struggles with HD content from YouTube. This is common to most netbooks. Similarly, ripped DVDs copied locally or played from a memory card or stick stuttered during playback.

The T91 has a 225 x 164mm footprint and is 25.2mm at its thinnest point and 28.4mm at its thickest. At just under 1kg it's not going to weigh you down much. There are just two USB ports but the usual D-SUB VGA connector, 10/100 ethernet and SD card slot are present and accounted for. Wireless comms are covered off with 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth V2.1. As a bonus there's a second SD slot so that you can keep a card in the T91 permanently. This is handy as you can sync files to the card so that you have a backup solution with you at all times.

The battery isn't removable and rated at five hours. In the real world, with WiFi enabled we found that we could work for around three hours between charges.

The bundled software was something of a mixed bag. The OS, Windows XP Home Edition SP3, was boosted with the inclusion of Microsoft Works, Norton Internet Security, Skype and a couple of other utilities. There's also a 60 day trial of Microsoft Office 2007 but if you're after a fuller office suite we'd suggest downloading Open Office or one of the other open source solutions.

At the top of the screen is a small pop-up that provides quick access to a number of utilities that Asus bundles with the T91. Although they duplicate apps that might already come with Windows XP, they offer one huge difference - they're designed to be used with fingers.

We did have a couple of complaints with the applications. The Widget program, which bears a resemblance to Apple's Dashboard function, doesn't work in portrait orientation. So, if it's invoked the screen toggles back to landscape mode. However when you come out, it does return to portrait mode.

Also, the Magic Desktop is perhaps one of the silliest apps we've ever seen on a computer that purports to be a business tool. We can see how it might be fun for kids with its fancy icons and animated mouse pointer but the T91's price-tag makes us think that this isn't a netbook being pitched at young kids.

While the Asus Eee Touch T91 represents a step forward in the netbook market, we see it as a prototype-style device. The touchscreen needs some work and a faster processor would make a difference as well. At this price, we expected just a little more bang for our buck.

By Anthony Caruana

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