I recently purchased an Asus Eee PC T91MT convertible tablet netbook. I was doing research for a netbook project for my district (see post) and I ran across this little gem on the Asus website. I was intrigued by the possibilities of a convertible tablet netbook but was unable to get one on demo, so I purchased three for field testing with different people in our district (it might be important to note that our district is heavily invested in tablet PC technology). I took one and gave the other two to other people attending the recent Texas Computer in Education Association conference in Austin, Texas. We were to put them through their paces to see if they were suitable for classroom use. The first thing we noticed was the undersized keyboard. While the 8.9" screen is adequate - it doesn't have the keyboard size to make it possible to input text via the keyboard on an extended basis. Of course, we didn't get the device strictly for it's netbook properties, but we also put the tablet functions quickly to work. The netbook handles Windows 7 Professional reasonably well, but struggles when you get more than two programs open at once. It worked great for taking notes during sessions and checking email - the size was spot on and the solid state drive made it more rugged for portable use.
The touch screen is a bit different than the one on the Toshiba Portege series of convertible notebooks/tablet PCs. It can be manipulated by either a stylus or your finger. Not only that, it's multi-touch. Unfortunately, Microsoft's OneNote gets a bit confused by the multi-touch functionality and you have to be careful while writing on the tablet.
One thing of note about this netbook: It does not fit into Microsoft's netbook standard therefore it is being shipped with Windows 7 Home Edition, not Starter Edition. We upgraded ours using our Microsoft School Licensing Agreement to Windows 7 Professional so we could join them to the domain.
In the end, all three of us like the netbooks, but the smaller keyboard and higher price (about $150 more than the 1005HA) as well as the sluggishness under a load kept us from using it for our netbook project. Nevertheless, they are great for meetings and days that require a long battery life (4-5 hours). I don't regret the decision to purchase these netbooks.
Picture Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35983122@N08/3545859496/
1 comments:
We got a few netbooks to test out last year and I was disappointed by the keyboard size. I think that the elementary students like the keyboard size (with smaller hands this makes sense). The shift key drove me crazy, kept hitting the arrow keys instead. A small keyboard is a small price to pay for the functionality it adds to the classroom!
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